Avishraa Reloaded

After leaving the mine, they had plundered a depot at the slave market - as nearly as An-uxhwi could tell, the same one he'd been sold to the mine owners from; he supposed it was convenient siting - which had been conspicuously unguarded.

“All dealing with the breakout,” Evrith had said.

They'd filled a pack with dried fruits and meats, things that would keep, and filled two water skins. An-uxhwi had found a javelin - longer than the ones he'd used when he was free, but he found it more natural as a weapon than the pickaxe. Evrith had rummaged around in several baskets, apparently containing slaves' former belongings. And then they'd left.

There had been some plantations, irrigated from the river, which they'd had to thread their way carefully through, but Evrith had known where and when to go. And now, they were past the last of the fragile greenery, into the world of rock and sand and dirt.

It had been easy for An-uxhwi to stop thinking of Evrith as a Soaker; in more ways than one, she wasn't like most of them. But a sharp reminder that, fundamentally, she still was one, came within hours of their escape.

They were both tired, certainly. They had been moving as fast as they could, getting as far away as they could, with no shade. But when Evrith, panting heavily, started stumbling, he recalled how quickly Soakers were reputed to dry out.

He doubted the literal truth of the stories that said they could dry up into dust, but surely it was bad for her to be so far from water?

Before he could voice the question aloud, Evrith called over her shoulder, in a hoarse voice, “No stopping yet. A little further!”

Finally, they came to a rocky rise, its face etched by countless cycles of wind. Evrith stared intently at it, then scrambled up a slope of loose rock with a sort of frantic energy. An-uxhwi followed her as she squeezed into a narrow cut in the rock face, coming out into a sort of hollow. Though open to the air, much of it was shielded from above by an overhang, leaving only a narrow strip of sky visible.

It was shady, it was cool, and it was well-hidden. It would do. Evrith, satisfied, proceeded to gently sink into a heap, the chains and shackles clattering against the rock floor.

An-uxhwi slunk close in cautious, respectful motions, offering up the water he was carrying - not because she didn't have her own, but because his body was more willing to move his limbs precisely as intended. “Can we safely leave the chains here?” he asked in much the same breath; he had been quietly assuming that she had carried their weight this far out of strategic choice.

“'S,” Evrith managed. (Now that they had stopped moving, he could see that her scales were starting to dry out again, as well.) She tremblingly grasped the water skin and drank from it, spared a little to splash on her face, and then corked it again. She added, a bit more coherently, “We can rest up here until the the sun is down-” Can? she thought. Must. “-and go on once it's dark.”

“I still have some strength to spare,” An-uxhwi volunteered. “Might it be of any use to you at this moment in time?”

She muzzily considered his offer. “I can cut the shackles off, but if you could pull them off me…” She considered the ones around her ankles. She couldn't bear the thought of bending herself into a circle to get those. “…maybe just the wrists and neck, for now.”

She extended a finger, and a faint, short blue line appeared at its tip. She held it to the cuff, as carefully as she could manage - if she severed an artery in the process, she was in trouble - and slowly traced a line through the metal, then started on another.

Evrith considered the future. There were many paths ahead, but in all the likeliest ones, An-uxhwi continued to travel with her, and she found this a bit odd. As a section of metal fell out of the cuff and Evrith paused to rest, she felt moved to ask about it.

“I'll have a very long way to go after this, and there's a tribe that would probably celebrate your return.” Having looked into his past while they'd been in the mine, she added, “Your brother among them. And that girl you were trying to court. Did you want to return to them?”

An-uxhwi's gaze was hard to read, some mixture of embarrassment, a humble predisposition to the topic of personal associations, and a trickle of awkwardness at having a regular conversation with someone who could probably predict what he was next going to say.

“And indeed I would cherish my contact with all those you have mentioned,” he observed. “Yet I do suspect if our path taken together ended here, you would not be asking - you would be sending me away.” Softly but with an eerie determination, he added: “I hope to remain with you until I have outlived my usefulness for the future you seek.”

The demands of decency were satisfied, then. She had used others without their knowledge before, but she preferred not to, if she could avoid it.

Regardless, watching the way his words etched the future that much deeper into its course, it was hard not to feel that she had, in some obscure way, trapped him.

Starting on the other cuff, Evrith murmured, “As you wish. I can't afford to send you away.” She was glad that the work allowed her to avoid his gaze.

And yet An-uxhwi was perhaps more lucid of his role than others had been. In many ways, he possessed an intuition for the consequences of her magical abilities that others lacked, although he could of course not glance into the future himself.

He understood himself as a tool in her arsenal. He understood that he put himself into danger and that his life was of, at best, secondary importance to her. But she had carved him and many of his people out of immediate slavery - while there was no doubt a limit to how far his perceived debt would carry him, it certainly carried him now.

She had earnt his trust and the small detail that she intimately knew she was a poor recipient for said trust in the long-run paradoxically made it no less earned. Other people simply didn't know that they would eventually upset their companions.

By now, An-uxhwi was leaning in slightly, reaching to pry the chains off of Evrith.

Evrith felt better as the chains and shackles were pulled off. She shortened her blade, and began, very carefully (since she couldn't see exactly what she was doing) to etch her way through the collar as well.

Tired as she was, she felt the need to talk. She hadn't gotten many friendly listeners over the years. “It must be a little strange, working with a takma.”

“Is it strange for you to be working with one of my kind?” An-uxhwi countered amicably. “It is true that you live in the body of a Soaker,” he said. “But you are not like them. Perhaps this is only because the future you see depends on me in some way I cannot fathom, but you have been kind to me and my people.

“You, then, are Evrith first and foremost. If you are also a Soaker in any negative sense, I am blind to it.”

Evrith eyed him in a vaguely critical way. “The only way I'm different is that what I see doesn't allow me the luxury of ignorance. Others have to get their information elsewhere. It makes stupidity easy.”

She paused in her activity and looked at him very directly. “How many of your people, do you think, would stop to find out what I was like instead of seeing me as an unusually puny takma? Unless, perhaps, they were made to - by being put into a cell with me, say?”

An-uxhwi glanced at her, unsure where her line of thought had even come from. By tone, it seemed like she was trying to discuss something with him, related to something he had said, but it struck him as a wholly unrelated question.

He decided to answer it in the spirit of latter enquiry. “I cannot say. I have met those who would attack a Soaker without question and have heard of those who trade with them of their own volition. Why do you ask? Should it be because you seek a sanctuary amongst my people for any reason, I should be able to find one.”

Evrith sighed. “My point is,” she said, deciding to be more direct, “generalizing an entire group is a futile exercise. It's ultimately what got you and I enslaved. It's also,” she added, her voice taking on an edge, “what led a certain group of raiders to kill off an oasis full of settlers and put their children to death.”

She looked away for a moment, then lay her head back down and started etching away at the collar again. “I just want you,” she said, a bit more calmly, “to keep that in mind, because it has a lot to do with what I'm going to be doing.”

An-uxhwi tilted his muzzle. Somewhat quizzically, he said: “Yes?” If he was perturbed by the memory or her observations, he showed no sign of it. Perhaps he truly didn't understand what she was getting at; or perhaps he intimately understood it on a different level entirely and was unsure why she was lecturing him at all.

Evrith gave up. Being able to see through time didn't give her the power to see into someone's head, and she couldn't tell what he thought about what she'd said, but clearly it wasn't making much of an impression.

Maybe it didn't matter. It didn't seem like he was going to become uncooperative anyway.

To An-uxhwi, it was clear enough - through her body language, if not her face - that she was discouraged, but she evidently had no intention of pursuing the matter further. Instead, she finally asked, “Why do you keep saying 'soakers'?”

“Your scales,” An-uxhwi said, gently. “You are far more fragile to Daxelh's Burning Eye and the desert climes. Right now I wish it weren't so - for you too are suffering your kind's burden, here and now - though it has also granted my people some paradoxical security in arid places.”

Evrith turned this over in her mind, then barked a weak laugh. “Fair enough.” A piece finally dropped out of her collar; she lifted her head and rotated the collar so that it fell off, hitting the rock with a sharp clang.

She wearily dropped her head to the ground again. “That's something else we'll need to find, at least before the sun comes up again. Not just water, but some place I can have a bath.” She closed her eyes. “It'll be good to go back to where it's not so dry. I miss rain, and trees.”

“I will help you get there,” An-uxhwi promised. Normally, he might have made a slightly different promise in the form I will help you find it, but he supposed that particular promise was moot given her abilities.

“Thank you,” Evrith mumbled. “I'll need the help.” She took the gourd she'd stolen earlier and worked out the cork; An-uxhwi caught a strongly alcoholic whiff.

She took a small drink, wheezed a bit, then stoppered the gourd again. “You had a pendant before you were captured. It was in the supply depot, with the other things they took off slaves - I suppose they didn't think it was worth selling. I put in the pack. I don't know if I'll ever be in a position to guide you back here, but maybe it'll be some consolation for that.”

An-uxhwi's antennae seemed unsure what to do with themselves for a moment, conveying a mixture of confusion, surprise and delight of uncertain intensity. “…thank you,” he said, a deep humbleness to his tone. Haltingly: “I had assumed– our captors– I'm surprised you managed to recover it.”

A tension in his body betrayed that a part of him wanted to rummage through the pack immediately, but that he considered it rude to simply seize it like that. Instead, he elaborated: “It's likely you already know this, but it… was a gift from my sister, Je-kan, as that Daxelh's gaze might treat me favourably.”

The matter seemed to cause him mild embarrassment, perhaps in light of the whole slavery debacle, but it was clear that despite the broken metaphysical promise (which, at any rate, he seemed quite too clever to blindly trust in) the trinket still meant a lot to him. At the very least, it likely served as a reminder of his family, and with that the hope that they were safe.

Evrith could infer that Daxelh was a deity, but gazing into An-uxhwi's past had not enlightened her much further. Neither his birth people nor the Pa'irket had had any notion of temples or detailed theology.

Or priests. That, at least, Evrith approved of. She wasn't fond of priests.

“I was just grabbing some things that we might barter later,” she replied sleepily, “and I thought you might want that back. If I had something from my family, I'd want it back.” Her eyelids quivered; exhaustion seemed to have caught up with her.

An-uxhwi made a soft, affirmative noise, clearly agreeing with the assessment, even as his expression drifted to one of concern. “Rest, perhaps? Get your strength back,” he suggested. “I will remain awake and stand guard.” He might not make a formidable guard, but if all else failed, he could certainly scream at the top of his lungs to wake her if it became necessary.

Evrith fell asleep in mid-nod. Evidently she felt that he would be a sufficient shield against danger. Or, perhaps, she was just too tired to look into the future.