“The magic the priests use to keep demons out of our land?”
“They harness death. But we can harness life.”
“Then why do you demand the sacrifice of women like me?”
“We ask merely a chance to harvest what is already being thrown away.”
Asvi thought of the chasm that separated the uplands from dragon country and how the priests evidently did not know about what lay beyond. She thought of quiet villages and tidy lives, of women standing sentry duty in watchtowers as if it were commonplace and perfectly normal for women to take on tasks that were elsewhere considered suitable only for men. She remembered the hunters she’d seen, with their budding horns and their youth and vigor. The outlying villages surrounded by bone fences and heaps of sand radiating heat under the summer sun. The strange vegetation never seen in the lowlands where people lived.
Maybe she should have gone with the Aivur sailor who’d offered her adventure so long ago. Maybe she should have settled into the room by the kitchen and accepted its boundaries for the rest of her life.
But what use are regrets? She was here now. There was no going back to what might have been. Anyway, here at the edge, she was glad to have seen this much.
“Did you bring me here to eat me?”
“Eat you?” The woman laughed. A deep echo of the dragon’s belling call shivered within her mirth, a reminder of how exceedingly large and powerful a dragon was. “I have not tried human flesh myself, but the ancestors say it is sour and either too greasy or too gristly. I brought you here, sister, because you asked to travel on.”
“Is this the end of the journey?”
“You tell me.”
Asvi again looked east over the wide wilderness and its hidden contours. A thread of fog had undulated out of the undifferentiated tangle of mist and was crawling up the face of the escarpment toward the very spot where she was standing.
“They never rest and will never rest until we have destroyed every last one.”
The woman stepped back just as Asvi heard a scrape of claws and a hiss of breath like the boiling of a kettle. A thick smear like an oily cloud of white slithered over the lip of the cliff and solidified into a demon. Once before, she had stood this close to a demon. It was about big as she was, with six tentacle-like legs, a pair of lipless mouths, and a stack of pipelike tendrils clustered atop its dome of a head that pumped a steady stream of stinking mist into the air. Rearing back, it braced itself on its four hind limbs as its forelimbs waved to taste the air and find her scent.
Run.
If you run, they will chase you, her father had taught his children. Her brother had panicked and run. But even if you didn’t run, it would still see you.
Its head swung around, getting a fix on her. The dull round nodules in its head lit as if fired from within to an almost blinding blaze of garish color, like molten gems. The eyes had woken and would not sleep until they had fully absorbed every last fiber of its prey.
It opened its upper mouth and spat toward her. Too far to do real damage; still, the spray of mist spattered across her face, raising welts as she put up her hands too late to shield herself. Only then did her shock evaporate as a vision of her scalded brother flashed in her mind’s eye, how he had writhed in the grip of an unspeakable agony, unable even to cry or moan. Maybe it would have been better if the demon had eaten him to cut short the torment of his slow dying.
The demon slid closer to her, gurgling as it readied a bath of acid in which to boil her alive, so she couldn’t move while it sucked her dry.
The dragon—she hadn’t seen it change—dived from above and behind her. Too late the demon sheared away, making for the cliff. The dragon’s claws fastened over the demon’s hindquarters and lifted it as the demon spat harmlessly toward the receding ground. The dragon flew in a spiral upward into the cloudless blue of the sky. From that great height, it dropped the demon. When the creature hit the base of the escarpment, it cracked like stone into shards.
Asvi’s legs gave way. She collapsed onto her knees, hands shaking, breath coming in gasps. Yet it was exhilarating, too. So easily the dragon had disposed of the deadly beast.
With a scuff, the dragon landed many paces away from her. The air shimmered, drawn in and drawn out, and the woman with horns walked over to her, dusting off her hands.
“We were not the only beings who retreated, or died, when the demons invaded,” she remarked as she came up to Asvi. She indicated the wilderness. “When we became too few to keep their numbers in check, the ancestors made peace with the inevitability of our obliteration.”
“Until my people came from over the sea.”
“All beings in the world are woven with the weft and warp of the world’s magic. But each may wield it differently.”
“Do dragons weave?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know about weaving?”
“She who gave herself to the sands was a weaver in a town called Gedaala. Do you know that place?”
Asvi clambered to her feet, even as she knew she had no weapons that could defeat this creature standing beside her and chatting with her in the most unremarkable and yet utterly astounding way. “I have heard its name spoken in passing, but I don’t know it. Do you?”
“I grew up there. I lived there and worked there as a weaver. I was sent on the long walk. I crossed into dragon country, thinking I was meant to die there. I lived for a time in the company of others like me.”
“In the village I saw? The one that those I came with were being led to?”
“Yes. When I was ready, I went into the sands. Now I am as you see me.”
“So you do eat us!” She took a step away, caught herself retreating—do not run!—and held her ground.
“We do not eat you.”
Having flown with a dragon and seen the edge of the habitable world had given Asvi a new and exciting tincture of bravery. She thrust out her chin boldly. “This woman you claim to have once been. What was her name?”
“Merea.”
“If I called you Merea, would you answer?”
“I am Merea.”
“You are a dragon.”
“I am Merea, and I am a dragon.”
“But the woman named Merea is gone. You consumed her, did you not? Devoured everything of her except to use her form to speak to me. Is that what the sands are? A nesting ground?”
“The sand is what remains of the ancestors, the grains of their flesh and the sparks of their memories. Your bodies and your minds cook within the heat, if you will. And out of this, we are transformed and reborn.”
“So it is no different than it ever was. After our labor and our lives are used up down there, we are sent up here. You use up the last scraps that are left of us.” Anger made her heart ache. Disappointment bit like betrayal. Maybe it would be better to leap off the cliff and dash herself to death on the shores of the demon wilderness. At least that would be her choice.
The woman looked at the ground with a sigh, then up again. “Shall I tell you of my life? How my family sold me to a weaving shed when I was still a child? How I sat on the ground chained to a loom for years and years, never seeing daylight except through the open shed door? Was fed too little? Abused by those who owned me? How my hands became broken by the work so I was no longer useful to them? Or to any family, because I was too ill to bear sons and keep a husband? How I hobbled, in pain, up the long walk? I did not weep, you know. I believed I deserved nothing more. And yet the sky amazed me. I had forgotten the world could be beautiful.”