The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1 by Jonathan Strahan

Author:Jonathan Strahan [Strahan, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781534449619
Publisher: Saga Press
Published: 2020-09-08T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

People will kill what they do not understand, Mam used to say. They will flay it with their tongues if their hands are tied.

When the sentries catch up with Nata it is too late: the dune song has already begun.

It is almost the end of night when the whirlwind first starts to appear. Its coming is announced by a faraway lament, a deep-throated complaint, serving as the right augury for the arrival of feet and torches at the exact place where Nata and Tasé succumbed to fatigue and made camp.

The Chief has come along with the sentries. The light of the torch and shadow of his cloak darken his face in a manner that is representative of his heaving chest and his thoughts so clear they could’ve been bellowed: There will be no mercy this time.

“Take them,” is all he says.

There is a spat, sand flying in all directions, torches wavering in the wind of coming dawn, but all is soon settled. Nata is at one end, subdued; Tasé restrained at the other.

The Chief faces him first, stooping to his height. Then he raises his hand and deals Tasé a big slap in the middle of his face. There’s a snap of cartilage.

“Just offer me,” Tasé says, his voice loud for the first time, his speech bubbling with blood and snot and spittle. “Offer me, so this nightmare can end for the two of us.”

The silence that passes is filled only by the picking up of sand into dust, the whirlwind now visible in the distance, gathering force, a storm within a storm. Against the backdrop of the orange horizon of the rising sun, it is a roaring ghoul of black wind.

“No,” the Chief says, looking at the cloud as it approaches. “No.”

And in the midst of all this, with no one paying attention to Nata at all, she finds her opening.

She darts, moves too quickly, out of reach of the sentries’ arms, too quickly for their legs to find purchase in the silty sand. She flits with smaller feet, one step, five steps, and soon she is too far. The shouts behind her curse, yell, call her crazy, mad girl, selfish, putting Isiuwa in jeopardy, but she is deaf to them because her eyes are fixed on the glorious, glorious light ahead.

For the first time, she sees the whirlwind through her own eyes, and not through the eyes of Mam’s stories. The Chief is right in calling it the breath of the gods, because it holds within it a crackle, light and lightning, embraced by wind roiling within itself, gloved in sand and dust and debris. It moves like a cloud would if it were angry. It roars mightily now, up close, as if made of mouth alone. Sand hisses in its wake, an unending flute, an orchestra of whistles, a posse of snakes.

Glorious.

She halts then, right in its path, and turns, the wall of light and sound and dust right behind her. The Chief and the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.