Three days ride south of the coast and the difference between day and night was nothing more than a color on the horizon. The yellow sand had wilted to almost shadeless grey. The ripples and dunes would have snared Lucius’ feet as surely as a swamp if he hadn’t been tied onto the back of a camel. The dogged dromedary plodded up and down the desert, only voicing complaint through the gaseous ejections of its rear.

Golden trudged beside the camel, his wrists bound just as tight as Lucius’ legs were to the desert steed. “This is outrageous,” the featherless bird said.

“You’re the one that got us captured,” my pupil snarled. Sweat ran down from his hair, trickling into his eyes and wetting his lips. This wasn’t from the heat but from his body trying to fight off the venom. His body was liquefying on the inside, not the least of which symptoms were a form of sea sickness atop the camel. His balance kept rattling around his skull like a children’s toy, which made the flat of the desert seem to come alive.

“Disposing of that garrison was a necessity and besides, this will get you so much more than Vassermark could ever offer you. I just don’t understand why I’m walking! I’m their premier dowsing, aren’t I? Such incourtesy.”

“Where are they taking us?” Lucius asked, shutting his eyes in a vain hope of settling his stomach.

“Isn’t that obvious?” Golden asked. “To their god. I probably know the fellow. Hope there’s no bad blood between the two of us. You’re lucky I was born of the Shepherd. My mother was always a friendly sort and everyone was friendly with her.”

“Oh yes, who would want to piss off Death?”

“She’s not death. Being the goddess of death is not the same as being the ontological concept of it.”

“So that’s somebody else?”

Golden took a time longer than I would have wished before he answered that inquiry. He of course knew that Lucius had been taught much of the true nature of magic, but there are realms of speculation even I do not have proof of and certainly neither does he. What he told my pupil was a meaningless wedge between he and I that accomplished nothing beyond giving him reason to think that I may have overstated my wisdom. He said, “Not in our layer of existence, but there does seem to be such a thing as death, doesn’t there?”

“And this tribal god. What layer does he exist in?”

“Ours obviously, else we couldn’t converse with them. There’s no point in worshiping something like gravity, you know.”

Lucius cracked an eye open to look down at his unwanted companion. “And this thing deserves worship?”

“Oh yes,” he said with a devilish grin. “Worship is a form of barter, you know.”

“If that’s how you see it, then civilized people have gotten screwed.”

“Have they?” Golden asked, his tone markedly different. “They have civilization, don’t they?”

“Lu!” Lupa shouted as she came running across the sand and waving her hand.

He snarled at her. “Don’t call me that.”

“We’re almost at the spot where we can heal you,” she said as she caught up with the camel and put her hand to its reins.

“I don’t need a special spot. I just need to be left alone and I’ll be right as rain. Do you know that expression here in a place that doesn’t rain?”

She sighed and shook her head. It was Golden who chimed in to explain that the idiom had actually come from the wastelands, where their only water came from the sky, rain as it were. Lupa saved him from his own embarrassment and said, “The holy man won’t let you regenerate. It’s obviously not safe. Even though at this point you’d probably get lost and become a mummy if you tried to make it back to the coast that doesn’t mean you aren’t stupid enough to kill a bunch of us and try.”

“I wouldn’t become a mummy,” Lucius said, turning his gaze to the sandstone gullies before them, like wrinkles in the face of the desert. “I could just take him for water.”

“So, I was able to negotiate a compromise with him. You see these cliffs? They used to be a city.”

Lucius scoffed. “When?”

“Back when the gods walked among the mortals,” she said, and that shut him up well. She had no way of knowing it, but he was already familiar with the age of my people. Taking his reaction as a prompt to go on, his jailor explained, “Obviously, it’s been abandoned for as long as history, but that’s short as the gods reckon it. Some of their stuff is still here.”

Lucius tried to squint his eyes and see through the mirages and sand gusts. “What? Like gold?”

Golden snarled. “Gods and beasts alike do not barter in currency.”

Lucius rolled his eyes. “Forgive me for not thinking this sand pit is filled with wine, women, and whimsy.”

The bird snorted. “At least you know some things we do like.”

Lupa groaned and took the camel down a slope. With no sun, there was little wind. If the sand weren’t so fine, it would hardly lift up at all. So just getting their heads below the floor of the wastelands cut their temperature. Tugging a thin blanket off the back of the camel’s saddle, Lupa explained, “It’s nothing of much value. Just sentimental to our god. Nobody has ever gotten it because… well… how do I put this nicely? We use it as an execution pit?”

Lucius asked, “You people have the death penalty? Half of you are cannibals.”

She didn’t look at him as she said, “There are some things that can never be permitted and yet can never be eradicated.” For further reading on this subject, I suggest a curious reader investigate their nearest library for a treatise on natural rights and commonalities between the faiths. There are times when even rape and murder can be permitted by society, but not all crimes.

Like most things in the wastelands, the thing was no longer itself. The city was a shadow of a city. While it was home to creatures that walked on two legs and slept beneath those stone eaves, those things could not be said to be people. They were shades less fit for cohabitation than the scorpions. It made the city oasis almost not worth the danger to visit. The sand people found it to be a familiar danger however, and they were used to the protection of hounds at their flanks. It can be assumed, though I have no proof, that a good number of the stragglers were killed here, perhaps a dozen total. Such a trifling loss was not recorded by the priest.

They cared only about the water and Lucius’ hospital as they euphemistically called it.

The priest, Luigi Sacerdote, spoke to him gruffly, describing the relic in vague, poetic terms. He had only heard it described by oral tradition, something touched up with reverence every generation.

Still sick with the venom, Lucius was in no shape to belabor the discussion. “Just let me in,” he growled, and was given a rope. They pointed spears at him too. At their prodding, he wrapped the rope around his waist and eased himself down a masonry crag to the tunnels below. Eventually, his sandaled feet hit the sand floor and he looked up expecting a knife to cut himself free.

Rather than a knife, Lupa joined him. “Your bonds,” she said, untying him.

Lucius frowned, rubbing the sand rash that had formed across his wrists. “Are you coming with me or something?”

Lupa shrugged and leaned against the wall. “I’ll be staying here until you’re ready to leave. I have to bind you again before they’ll let you out.”

He looked up, eyeing the cracks and crevices of ancient bricks. “I could climb.”

“They have spears.”

He looked over his shoulder, to the dusty catacombs of the lost city. There was light. “What if I find another exit?”

“Then you would be craftier than a thousand men over a thousand years, but you’d still be lost in a desert with neither sun nor star to guide you home. So, not very crafty after all.”

He snorted. Turning to the dungeon, he picked up a loose brick and shook the sand from it. A cruder weapon I can hardly imagine, but fit enough for his purpose. “So, I just have to go in there, kill all the… what’s in here, anyway?”

“Lion worms are the worst you’ll encounter.”

“Any scorpions?”

She turned up her hands. “Maybe, but once your stigmata is back, will that matter?”

He wrinkled his lip. “Maybe, maybe not. What if I don’t come back?”

She pinched between her brow and said, “Then I have to go get your corpse and bring it out, because this was my idea. Try not to? That’d be incredibly rude.”

“I think you can handle a bit of rudeness, you man-eater.”

“You wish.”

He turned away from her and took a deep breath of the dungeon, smelling the dank air oozing from the pit. “Right then. Kill the monsters, get the thing, get out. What could be easier? I love a straightforward problem.” He strode into the tunnel, half his mind watching for a way to crawl out and imagining how he might kill his way through the army and force Golden to show him a way out. The other half watched as inverted roots appeared from beneath his feet. Hardy plants the texture of coral had stabbed through the firmament and stood proud of the sand like brush.

Perhaps it’s a bit silly of me to say they are like roots. They are roots. They are roots from an inverted world the sunless desert laid atop, never knowing the warmth of the other inferno, not even through molten crags of slagged stone. The locals didn’t mind the intrusion. The plants proved to be one of the best sources of firewood in the whole of the wastelands, something Lupa put to quick utility as she waited for my pupil’s return. They were like a half-stone jungle, a refuge for all manner of creatures that crept and hid.

For they were one of the few habitats that a lion worm could not slam its maw into, ripping the critter apart and devouring it skin, bone, blood and all. Lucius had been taught what a lion worm was. That day he learned what they were and the difference between those two concepts is not to be understated.

Still, if one wants to sharpen a blade, a hard stone is needed.