Law of the Wolf Tower: The Claidi Journals Book 1, Tanith Lee [pocket ebook reader .TXT] 📗

you couldn’t. I’d put on an out-of-fashion dress for the escape, with a normal skirt. It had a sash too, which now I found Nemian had pulled off and was tying over my nose and mouth. He had done something similar for himself.

But our eyes – how the dust and sand particles stung. And there were spiteful bits of grit.

We crawled among the rocks, trying to find some sort of shelter, but the water was also splashing out from the fall and the pool as the winds stirred them, and Nemian bellowed that we mustn’t let this poisonous fluid even touch us. Then somehow we were outside the rocks and couldn’t, in the chaos, find them again.

The noise of the dust winds was fearsome. It sounded like something truly terrible, without pity or thought – which it was.

I’d grabbed my little sack – a reflex.

We staggered about, and Nemian grasped my other hand. I find it reassuring to report that, in this situation, I wasn’t thrilled when he did that.

He bawled at me we mustn’t become separated.

Heads bowed, we tried to push forward. The dust-winds slapped and punched us. Apparently, so I gathered from his yells, there had been another rocky place further on, which he had spotted as the wind started to build up. This might provide more shelter.

But it was useless. In the end, we crouched down, and covered our heads with our arms. Actually, in his case, only one arm, as he had put the other around me.

At another time, bliss, I suppose. But I was terrified. Not of what the storm could do, exactly, although he said after they can kill, and I believe him. Just of the sheer ferocity of it.

Then, with no warning, the winds – there seemed about six of them – dropped. They fell round us like dry hot washing, and the grit and tiny stones rattled along the ground.

We raised our faces, and saw the strangest – to me – sight.

In House books I’d stolen glances at, I had seen pictures of ancient cities that once had existed in the world before the Waste claimed everything. And this thing I saw now was surely such a city, or its remains.

The land had dropped gradually, and there was a sort of basin, and in this some tall towers with windows, or spaces where windows had been, and ornamented roofs with domes and pedestals. There were pillars too, a whole long line of them that might have stretched for a mile. Mostly there were walls, and carvings, or the bits that were left of them. There was one huge vase, with stone flowers still rising from it.

My eyes streamed, and everything wavered.

I said, ‘I never saw that from the higher ground.’

Nemian said, sounding irritated, ‘You probably couldn’t. The winds uncover things, just as they bury them.’

I’d thought the storm was over, but no. A second or so more, having shown me the city ruins as if to educate me, and the whole thing started up again.

How long it lasted this time I can only make a guess. It felt like hours. Finally I was lying on the ground. I cringe to say it, but I think I was whimpering. Well, maybe I wasn’t. Just grunting. Anyway Nemian was utterly still. And once everything stopped, I was afraid he’d smothered completely.

But he sat up, and shook himself, and combed handfuls of white and yellow dust out of his hair with both hands.

I have this ridiculous idea, only it couldn’t be, could it? He’d gone to sleep again. Didn’t dare ask.

I stood up, and shook out my skirt and my own hair, and then gave up. (I must, I thought, look like Nemian, as if I’d been damped and dipped in flour.)

When I looked around, the city ruin was gone again. The dip in the plain had become a mound.

Presently, about an hour later, when we walked up it, I stumbled on one stone blossom still sticking up from the buried vase.

Nemian made no mention of having taken my hand, or seeming to try to protect me. He scowled at the Waste, then his face simply became smooth and beautiful again. (His hair had lost its glory, though.)

He said, ‘Well done for bringing the water flask.’ (It was in the sack.) And then, ‘Reliable Claidi.’

But I’d grabbed the sack because it had this book in it. The flask, after all, was empty.

There were so many questions I should have asked, aren’t there. I bet you would have. You would have said, for instance, Where exactly are we going? And What will happen to me when we get there? And you might have insisted he knew that, though Claidi was perhaps half royal, she’d lived first as a dogsbody and floor polisher, and next as Jade Leaf’s maid-slave.

I didn’t ask or say anything much. I’m not completely making an excuse. For one thing, I was so tired. Compared to this tiredness, my other tired times in the House seemed nothing.

Someone else would have been upheld by a sense of excitement and optimism. But I felt exasperated a lot. With the Waste mainly. And with Nemian. And with me.

The sun got higher and hotter and more unbearable, and I was desperate to have a drink of water. One doesn’t realize how awful thirst is until something like this happens, worse than hunger.

After the buried city was behind us the land was very bumpy, and yet totally the same. Crash went the ground, hitting my feet.

Far, far off, still no nearer, the pale parched hills which looked, anyway, most uninviting.

We reached a rock, one rock, but it threw a shadow. So we sat down in the shadow.

Nemian stretched out his long legs. His clothing had been perfect, but wasn’t now.

‘You’ve been very strong,’ he said to me, ‘not drinking any water.’

‘There isn’t any.’

I’d thought he knew.

‘Oh,’ he said. He frowned. ‘Didn’t you bring any?’

‘Yes. You – we drank it.’

‘Well, yes. But I thought there was more. I