Free Down a Lost Road by J. Leigh Bralick Page B

few racking breaths, and I let my head lean against
his shoulder. All too soon he released me, dropping his hands to
his thighs and rocking back on his heels to look at me. I felt
suddenly embarrassed and couldn’t meet his gaze.
    “ I’m sorry,” he murmured.
“I can’t explain what I don’t really understand myself. Legends say
that once the sun governed our days and nights, but not anymore.
The light of Mekaema isn’t like the light shed by sun or
moon, but it provides for us.”
    I gazed up through burning eyes at the
strange sky, starless overhead but strangely luminous. Even at its
darkest point, at the zenith, the light dazzled my eyes. Strange,
strange world. I lowered my eyes, and through the wavering curls of
heat I glimpsed the silhouette of a dark fortress. I scrambled to
my feet.
    “ That place…that tower.
What is it?”
    “ That,” said Yatol, “is the
place we just escaped. It is called the Gorhiem
Bolstoed.”
    “ It’s hideous,” I said. I
wanted to say something else, but a deep fear clung to my throat
and drowned my voice.
    “ If we hadn’t escaped, they
would have broken us, and then executed us.” He turned away,
beckoning me. “Too many of my people have already stained those
floors with their blood. Our blood! It used to be ours, until the
Ungulion came in force in my father’s day, and drove out our
defenses.” He pointed to the horizon ahead of us. “They hold
another Citadel, too, in the land that is dark.”
    “ Is it always dark?” I
asked, running to catch up with him. I kept trying to work out how
that was possible, but couldn’t. “The planet doesn’t
rotate?”
    He glanced at me over his shoulder, a little
half-smile quirking his mouth. “I don’t know. They forgot to teach
us that in the academy. But I do know that Mekaema always
touches this face of the world, and so they call it blessed. The
other side, the dark side, always opposes Mekaema . Of
course, the sun-side isn’t totally dark or cold. We still get a
little light and heat from Olte, but not enough to sustain us.”
    That explained why I had been able to gaze
at it, then, and I said as much. “But if Olte gives so little
light, how do things live here?” I scowled at the desert. “I mean,
where things actually live.”
    “ Mekaema ’s light
brings warmth, light and darkness in their proper times. But the
dark face of the world is cursed, and feared. It is called the
Morsta Khay, but we call it K’hama, the Void. The myths say that
when the Ungulion came, they brought with them a huge rock that
became the cornerstone of their Citadel, and that the world
shuddered when it was established.”
    “ Like an
asteroid?”
    By the look on his face I could tell the
word held no meaning for him. I tried to imagine the Citadel,
flooded in darkness on the other side of the world. I slowed up,
staring in dread toward the horizon.
    “ Yatol…we’re going there,
aren’t we? That’s what I’m doing here. We’re going to the
Citadel.”
    Yatol swung around and came back to me,
clasping my shoulders and looking me in the eyes. “Merelin, let it
pass. We aren’t going to the Citadel. Not now.”
    “ But I know…” I still
stared past him, dazed. “I have to go.”
     

     

Chapter 7 – Akhmar
     
    I trudged in silence behind Yatol, caught up
in my own rambling thoughts. I had long since lost track of the
time, and nothing around me ever seemed to change to remind me of
the distance we had come. I only saw the sand swirling in pathetic
clouds around my feet, settling quickly to the ground in the dead
still air. Yatol kept up a brisk pace, only occasionally glancing
back to make sure I wasn’t lagging too far behind.
    My sandal tapped on a piece of parched
earth. What happened to the sand? I stared around in surprise. Took
another step forward. And where I’d expected more solid ground, my
leg sank to the knee in a shifting pit of…yep. Sand. Fantastic.
    I tugged violently at my leg. I