Drip…
A drop of ice-cold water fell.
The water had been dripping at slow but regular intervals for some time now. It was a vexing sound that pricked the ears and frayed the nerves.
Drip…
The droplet struck a rock, ran across its surface. Over time the falling water had begun to fill the cracks that spread across the hard pale ground, overflowing to puddle in the low places. In the dim light, the ground shone with surprising brightness, like an eye glistening with tears. Yes, dampness, water gathering—but it would never reach him.
Drip…
Guin had been sitting, hunched and motionless, listening, waiting for each drop to fall in turn, for some time now. All that water, and not a drop for him.
To chain a man to a rock so close to water that he might touch it if only he could extend a hand, lick the moisture with his tongue if only he could lean forward—surely, there is no better means to drive a prisoner mad, to weaken him, to bring him to Death’s threshold—no surer, more reliable method to torture a soul. Yet it was unclear how thoroughly the ones who had chained him there had thought out their plan, whether they had measured his chains when they placed him in that hole in the rock.
What was certain was that Guin was terribly thirsty. He wished, now, that he had not tasted the rock salt in that beautiful, white valley filled with death where he had met his captors.
Guin did not curse his circumstances or rage against his chains. He knew it would do no good; he also knew that protesting would show weakness to those who had placed him there. And so he sat, silently and still, without moving for several twists. With his feline head hung low over his chest, the half-man, half-beast stretched out his long legs and leaned up against the rock behind him, resting his body as best he could. He gave no outward sign of his fierce and growing frustration.
Again, almost mockingly: Drip…
In this rocky hollow untouched by morning, noon, or night, it was impossible for Guin to tell just how much time had passed since he came through the valley of white salt, met the four Lagon, and became their prisoner. It might have been a moment, or a half-day, or even an entire cycle of the sun. No one had brought him food, which meant that either not enough time had passed for a meal to come, or his captors simply did not deign to feed their monstrous charge.
Crouched in the darkness as he was, his golden eyes staring into the gloom, he felt that the very flow of time had lost its precision and meaning until it became something fluid, stretching and contracting like some black, insidious amoeba.
Yet Guin could not afford to let himself float in such uncertainty, to linger without taking action. He had come to these mountains, far across the desert, to ask the barbarian Lagon if they would join the Sem in fighting against a danger that threatened all who called Nospherus home—and he had only been given four days in which to do it.
If the four days ran out without word from Guin, the Sem fully intended to kill the hostages he had left behind: Princess Rinda and Prince Remus, the orphans of Parros. If he did not return, they would consider it a betrayal, branding him a coward who ran to save his own skin rather than stand and fight.
Of course there was Loto, high chieftain of the Raku, whose granddaughter Suni had been saved by Guin and the twins of Parros. Loto would fight to protect Rinda and Remus, certainly. Yet there would be strong opposition—the strongest from Ilateli of the Guro tribe—and though Guin did not doubt for a moment the success of his strategy to use the mercenary Istavan to force the Karoi tribe into joining the struggle, their chieftain, Gaulo, was as violent and as bloodthirsty as Ilateli and would surely also demand retribution if he suspected a betrayal. It only made matters worse that the Karoi were given to thinking of the peaceful Raku as brown-furred cowards.
Only the yidoh-herding Tubai and the Rasa, blood-kin to the Raku, were likely to side with Loto should a confrontation arise. But if the worst should happen, and the Raku, Tubai, and Rasa were forced to join against the combined forces of the Guro and the Karoi, they would be overwhelmed. The Guro and the Karoi, the traditional warrior clans of the Sem, aggressive and wild by nature, were also physically larger and stronger than the other wildlings. The mild-mannered Raku and Rasa wouldn’t stand a chance.
Guin just needed a little more time. Even if, by the time he returned, the Sem had split over whether or not to kill the twins, he felt confident that he could avert bloodshed and reconcile the tribes so long as he reached them before the fighting started. Then he could lead them to victory against their true enemy—or at least, that was what he hoped. So he sat, and thought, and waited.
The Sem were something very close to primitive humans: brave, and possessing the first rudiments of culture, yet unable to grapple with abstract concepts or complex ideas. Strategy, foresight, long-term calculations—not even the great Loto, considered a sage among his people, understood these things except in a vague and simple way. The minds of the Sem, like their bodies, resembled those of human children. Thus it had mystified them when Guin departed to ask for help from the Lagon giants when the Sem still had the upper hand in Nospherus, and the more suspicious among them had feared that their Riyaad, their prophesied leader, was abandoning them.
They did not understand why they had won every battle they had fought against the Mongauli army, even against numbers several times their own, nor how they had managed to turn every disadvantage into an advantage. They scarcely comprehended the scope of Guin’s efforts: the use of the hideous yidoh, the clever decoy, the calling to arms of the Karoi, and the near total destruction of all two thousand of Count Marus' blue knights. It had been enough for the little wildlings to mindlessly follow their leopard-headed champion, and so they had done faithfully, claiming victory again and again. It had never occurred to them to wonder why. They followed Guin because they saw him win, and trusted him to win again.
Yet had Guin failed even once, they would have ceased to follow him as swiftly as a dust-devil coils and fades in the Nospherus sun. “We Sem have our own way of fighting,” they would say, forgetting all that had passed. “Why rely on the help of a stranger?” From the very beginning, Guin was walking on a tight rope above a valley of shining blades. He had come this far without fault, but there was no guarantee that his next step would not be his last.
He had no choice but to walk on.
Now he sat in the dark, listening to the drip, drip, drip of the water, muttering to himself in a low growl.
He had made it this far. What good would it do to pause and quail, gazing at the taut rope ahead of him now? Even if he had to inch forward, clutching the rope with both hands, it would be progress. After all, no matter how grim his present situation, he was better off than when he had first appeared in the Roodwood, where his memory began.
Then he had been as one newly born, without a scrap of armor to protect him or an inkling of where he was, deep in an unknown forest rife with man-eating ghouls and hostile Mongauli knights. At that perilous awakening Guin had known only his name, and one other word—“Aurra”—its meaning as mysterious as his own identity. He was naked, bloodied, and freakish, with the head of a beast where the face of a man should have been. So he had been born, a twisted orphan of the Roodwood.
Shortly thereafter he had saved the twins of Parros from the knights of Stafolos Keep, more out of basic instinct than any conscious decision. Yet that act had set the wheel of his fate into motion, and soon he and the twins had become prisoners of the keep, only to escape when a night raid by the Karoi left Stafolos in flames. Together with a sellsword, Istavan of Valachia, and the little Sem girl Suni, the companions had set off down the Kes River on a raft, outrunning their pursuers from Alvon Keep and fleeing into the wilds of Nospherus. So he had run as a fugitive, not knowing why he had to be chased, and fighting simply to survive, until, at last, he found friends worth fighting for, the wildling Sem.
How differently the path of Guin’s days might have run had he encountered not the tiny desert denizens but a modern, mounted force, skilled in strategy, such as the armies of another of the kingdoms in the Middle Country, or the resistance forces desperately struggling to rebuild conquered Parros. Yet he thought not of what might have been, but of what was. He had been given the Sem, and the yidoh. He had been given Nospherus. That was all he had, and he was determined to do everything in his power to protect it from the Mongauli forces. Fate had dealt him his hand; it was up to him to play the cards.
Now another disturbing possibility occurred to him. What if, even before the Sem had the chance to execute the twins or fall into the tribal strife a stay of execution would surely entail, they were preemptively attacked by the Mongauli army? The four days he had requested from the Sem were more than just the amount of time he expected their trust in him to last. It was also the limit after which the various steps he had taken to ensure the Sem’s superiority in Nospherus would cease to become effective.
If anything occurred that he had not foreseen, or any of his carefully made calculations had been in error, all his effort would evaporate like the morning dew on the Nospherus sands.
In any case he only had two days from the time when the Lagon had captured him until his time was up. How many hours had passed since then? If a whole day had indeed gone by while he sat there chained to the rock, then only a day remained. And if, outside, the second day’s sun was already creeping toward the horizon, then the gambit was over, and he had lost.