She looked at him. The hair was gone from his head, leaving a flash-burned pate the colour of mottled bronze. His leather shirt was nothing but stitched strips hanging down his broad back like fragments of charred webbing. If anything, the skin of his back was darker and more mottled than that of his head. The bandages on his hand were gone as well, revealing swollen fingers and bruised joints. Incredibly, his skin was not cracked, not split open; instead, he had the appearance of having been gilded.
Baudin rose, slowly, each move aching with precision. She saw him blink, draw a deep breath. His eyes widened as he looked down at himself.
He glanced at her, then frowned.
'We're alive,' she said.
She followed suit when he clambered upright. They stood in a narrow arroyo, a gorge where flash floods had swept through with such force as to pack the bends of the channel with skull-sized rocks. The cut was less than five paces wide, the sides twice the height of a man and banded in variously coloured layers of sand.
The heat was fierce. Sweat ran in runnels down her back. 'Can you see anywhere we can climb out?' she asked.
'Can you smell Otataral?' Baudin muttered.
A chill wrapped her bones. We're
He shook his head. 'Can't smell a damned thing. Just a thought.'
'Not a nice one,' she snapped. 'Let's find a way out.'
They worked their way along the choked channel, surrounded by a whirring cloud of flies and their own echoes.
'I'm … heavier,' Baudin said after a few minutes.
She paused, glanced back at him. 'What?'
He shrugged. 'Heavier.' He kneaded his own arm with his uninjured hand. 'More solid. I don't know. Something's changed.'
'I could've sworn I was burning away to bones,' he said, his frown deepening.
'I haven't changed,' she said, turning and continuing on. She heard him follow a moment later.
They found a side channel, a cleft where torrents of water had rushed down to join the main channel's course, cutting through the layers of sandstone. This track quickly lost its depth, opening out after twenty or so paces. They emerged onto the edge of a range of blunt hills overlooking a broad valley of cracked earth. More hills, sharper and ragged, rose on the other side, blurry behind waves of heat.
Five hundred paces out on the pan stood a figure. At its feet lay a humped shape.
'Heboric,' Baudin said, squinting. 'The one standing.'
They walked side by side towards the ex-priest, who now watched them. His clothing too had burned away to little more than charred rags. Yet his flesh, beneath that skein of tattooing, was unmarred.
As they neared, Heboric gestured towards his own bald pate. 'Suits you, Baudin,' he said with a wry grin.
'What?' Felisin's tone was caustic. 'Are you two a brotherhood now?'
The figure at the old man's feet was the mage, Kulp. Her gaze fell to him. 'Dead.'
'Not quite,' Heboric said. 'He'll live, but he hit something going over the side.'
'Awaken him, then,' Felisin said. 'I don't plan on waiting in this heat just so he can get some beauty sleep. We're in a desert again, old man, in case you hadn't noticed. And desert means thirst, not to mention the fact that we're without food or anything like supplies. And finally, we've no idea where we are-'
'On the mainland,' Heboric said. 'Seven Cities.'
'How do you know that?'
The ex-priest shrugged. 'I know.'
Kulp groaned, then sat upright. One hand gingerly probing a lump above his left eye, the mage looked around. His expression soured.
'The Seventh Army's camped just over yonder,' Felisin said.
For a moment he looked credulous, then he gave a weary smile. 'Funny, lass.' He climbed to his feet and scanned the horizon on all sides before tilting his head back and sniffing the air. 'Mainland,' he pronounced.
'Why didn't all that white hair burn off?' Felisin asked. 'You're not even singed.'
'That dragon's warren,' Heboric said, 'what was it?'
