The Heart of the Nomad (Closed)

[Mordelain]

The taste of wheat and poppy and butter on her lips were heavenly, and she kicked Kales with a gentle tap of her stirrups to drive her forwards. Slowly they cleared the outpost, the satisfaction of sustenance mingling with freedom to lift her weary mind out of the gutter. She polished off the first half of the loaf with three greedy swallows and struggled to breathe between dough and sand. It got everywhere, and the citizens of Ikkaram had grown used to finding salt accompanying food when they did not wish it to be seasoned so. With precision, she nestled the remaining half on her lap whilst she reached for the map she kept in her right glove.

Alongside the belt she had been given an il'Jhain compass parchment when she had pledged an oath to the Freerunners. It had been her main source of information since she arrived. It displayed spidery lines of her planned routes, magically enchanted to change at the touch of her employer and the will of the Abdos. She held it up to the wide open horizon that set out the next leg of her journey and sighed with relief as the landmarks matched those on the paper.

They travelled for three miles before cresting the last of the gentle dunes between the Outpost and Karachi’s spice field. Of the many dozens of territories along the western banks of the river, Karachi was the first, ending in Saravesh much farther north before the Dead Lands. Beyond those lands were of course the Ruuya and the open waves of the violent sea. The dust trail Mordelain had found herself on quite by accident was a sign of irrigation at work. The shifting sands became solid soil, dirt, but by another name. Two long fences, stretching a thousand yards left and right of the road loomed suddenly, separating the land on either side of her advance into two massive paddocks. In their fertile grounds slouchy camels grazed amongst the bewildering array of furrows, troughs and desert flora.

A well versed traveller in farming practices might have expected to see the fields full of workers, clad in light robes and digging and working beneath vast parasols to shrug heatstroke and famine off their backs. Karachi however had mastered the art of constructing noria to irrigate his land. Spread over the paddocks, there were several such devices; great wheels pulled in circles by what Mordelain believed were creatures the farmers called oxen. Whilst she could never hope to learn the hundreds of names for each spice that grew around them, the mechanics of irrigation she could understand and appreciate.

They welled up water from deep underground caves and collected them into aquifers just below the surface of the paddocks. From their number, and the bounty of his crop of late, Mordelain assumed that he had all but mastered their secrets. Their trundling noise added to the silence of the desert, suggesting life and community even when there was none.

“Strange,” she mumbled, tucking the map into her robes before returning to her bread. She bit into it pensively, as if she were using the chewing motion to piece together the fragments of a particularly enthralling mystery. Her mind found itself wandering back to Karachi’s letter she had discovered in the abattoir of the Outpost, and she set her gaze onto the large door archway on the south facing wall of the spice farm’s central and only building. “Stranger still…” she added, picking out the elegant murals on the outer surface of the building, which was heavy mud lattice over a sturdy sandalwood frame, as all the buildings in Fallien were, except for the palaces and forts, and those of the scattered envoys and the wealthy. She had expected sheds, stables, store houses, but to be greeted with only one large compound, three hundred yards wide on its visible wall was a strange thing indeed.

As she pulled up before the large double doors, she noticed that ‘Karachi Sollum’ was painted in white paint and three languages on the curve of the arch. In the shade of the wall she dismounted, and started to pull off her muslin wraps to reveal the purple and leather garb of the Troubadour in all its splendour. Even with its light smattering of dust, she looked like a regent’s daughter or a priestess of Suravani’s temple. She draped it over Kales’ saddle and absent minded unstrapped the bundle of spices from her side. She whinnied as her load was lightened, or perhaps under the comfort of Mordelain’s hand as she patted her down with her free hand. The horse's hot breath ran down Mordelain's back as it tried to veer around to nuzzle it's rider.

“We will be home before nightfall, Kales,” she promised, finishing the bread in her mouth between syllables.

She turned and stepped forwards, trying to maintain the façade that she had not just risked life and limb to deliver her goods to his door. With a shaking hand she pattered out a loud knock on the worn wood. It was a series of sounds that she had been taught to deliver by the Freerunners, a code of sorts so that even if she were to fall to the perils of the Dagger Spine or the claws of the harpies, no rival could take up her load and profit from its continuance. She had considered that small fact no comfort, but it was nice to know that the price of good business was infallible when its actioners were brutally murdered.