Season of the Wild Hunt(Book 1 of The Seventh Gate series)

One Hundred Braids - pt 1

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Music: Pandana - Imagination

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One Hundred Braids

Nyani surveyed the sky. It was cloudless, a porcelain bowl encasing the world in glazed blue heat despite the early hour. A black speck caught her eye and she raised an arm against the sunlight, straining to identify the object and searching for any tell-tale sign of shieldshimmer, but the speck resolved into a hunting bird spiralling in effortless circles on a thermal. 

No threat. The landscape ahead appeared empty and silent.

Her companion was staring back in the direction from which they had come. At the foot of the hill, sparse clumps of withered thorn-brush petered out into a sun-cracked saltpan. Beyond the pan, red dunes piled up one behind the other in ever-increasing heights, stretching across the horizon from east to west until fading to auburn smears in the flickering heat-haze of the distance. This was the Wadinare, the Painted Desert. It made a formidable barrier between the lands to the south and those to the north, all but impenetrable except to those who knew its secrets.

"Missing the sand in your teeth already?" Drought-bitten grass crunched underfoot as Nyani, too, turned to look south.

"I was thinking we couldn't have left a plainer sign saying 'They went this way!'" Ashira scowled, brow wrinkling above dark almond eyes. A double set of hollows and sharp-edged shadows marked their recent passage across the red dunes, stark against the otherwise unblemished sands.

 "Mm. I suppose we could've walked backwards sweeping our tracks. A little slow, not to mention tough on the back." Nyani began to smile as she cast a sidelong look at her friend. "But probably easier for you than me, Díga." 

Ashira grinned at the jibe. Her brother had given her the petname - runt - as a child, but Nyani had not called her by it either in affection or teasing in a long time.

"We've lost days in that sandstorm. We should get moving," Nyani continued, her smile fading along with her relief at their successful desert crossing.

There were no obvious signs of pursuit, but the anxiety that dogged her steps reared its head again. The beasts that hunted them - hunted her - were capable of tracking them even across the scorched Wadinare, and would need no tracks to follow. They could be on this side of the sands already. They came from the North, after all. If they were to run into a pack now, so far from refuge and with no means to escape... She muttered a curse to quell her unease, and dismissed the tracks with a flick of her hand.

"No cure for that. If our luck holds, another noyalasi will blow through before anything sniffs us out. Come on, we've hours before sundown. Let's put some miles between us and our sign."

The Wadinare devoured the unwary, the ignorant, or simply the ill-prepared, but the women were none of those. For weeks they had been travelling by night to avoid the deadly heat of the sun and conserve their energy, but also to navigate more surely by the stars. This morning, however, the dawn light revealed that they had almost breached the boundaries of the dunes and so they pushed on into the day, eager to put the endless slogging up and down across the sands behind them. 

They turned their backs on the Wadinare, on the south, and their distant home. Sandy hills anchored by stunted shrubs stretched away to the north. Nyani took a mouthful of water from the skin she carried, then offered it to Ashira. It had the stale flavour of too many days in the skin, tepid dregs that quenched thirst without pleasure in the refreshment.

A thin shriek from above lifted their eyes skywards. The hawk had quit its spiralling. It plunged towards the earth, flaring to break its descent barely a dozen feet above their heads. With a flash of sunlight on one golden eye and a lazy beat of its wings it swooped by, letting out another call before disappearing behind a hill to the north.