Dead Country

Begin Reading Table of Contents About the Author Copyright Page To my family 1 Tara walked out of the Badlands to her father’s funeral, trailing memories and dust. The last stars failed and the sky hung blue above her and the ground cracked underfoot. She kept to the path, a sunbaked runoff trench left by the thunderstorms that scoured the land each season. Black-green moss clustered in the shade of the rocks beside the trench. The moss grew slowly and did tender work, turning the bones of the world to something livable. One false step could erase a century of progress, so Tara followed paths already destroyed. Years ago, after the Hidden Schools kicked her out, she had followed this same path, half-blind and half-dead, caked with sand and her own blood and the blood of the carrion birds she’d caught and killed to make it through the desert, home, to Edgemont. Home to the town she’d run away from, years and a lifetime before. She had left an eager angry witch-girl, drunk on sweet hope and intimations of power that would have soured if she stayed. She had returned a sorceress and a shell, betrayed by her teachers and by the world of Craft she’d hoped to master. They used her and cast her out, but she refused to die. She had walked across the flats for weeks, alone. Each step hurt. She’d remembered that walk many times in the years since, in the life she’d built back east in the great metropolis of Alt Coulumb as a necromancer and counselor to gods. There, on the sidewalk, in her small apartment, in boardrooms and at cocktail bars, the memories felt safe, like a story that was over. She had told dates about this walk over drinks—she was bad at dates—told them how many miles she’d crossed, how she dealt with blisters, how she used to fake death to lure scavengers in reach of her hands and knife. Two Aviations into the night, she was tipsy enough to laugh about it all. She held the story as lightly as a student might hold the answer to a thaumaturgy problem she’d memorized off flash cards. Bloodless. Her dates didn’t take it the same way. Here, now, with dirt shifting underfoot, the memories did not feel safe, did not even feel like memories: the agony of her raw throat, her cracking skin, her swollen tongue. In pain there had been a clarity of purpose. The desert was not dead. It was honest. Everything here—the cactus, that circling vulture above, the dune rat whose tracks she passed, the bugs that sang at dusk—moved to survive. Just like her. Forward. Farther. In the end she’d made it home. To her family, who did not understand her but pretended they could. To a life she never understood, either. Then the world took her up. The job offer came through. She left again. And now her father was dead. She had packed in a hurry. Clothes, toothbrush, tools of the trade, and, of course, the black folder tied with black string that she brought everywhere these days. The room was dark, as dark as Alt Coulumb ever was, the great city sprawled outside her window and the letter a moonlit ghost on her end table. Her mother’s pen had worked the paper in fine angled whorls of measured black. If she turned on the light the ink would have had a color, but the light hurt her eyes. Just that afternoon Tara had been helping Cat with mortgage paperwork. Cat, punchy after too much coffee and more sitting than she tended to do when she wasn’t on stakeout, poked fun at Tara’s handwriting, schoolhouse-mannered after all these years. Why can’t you just scribble like a normal person? Her mother was why. When she got home, she found the letter waiting. She felt sick when she saw it on the desk. She felt sick when she looked at the jackets, slacks, and shirts folded in her suitcase, between the little brightly colored organizers she had bought to keep her clothes from wrinkling, which she always used even though they never worked. If she had to pack and make it to the airport by will alone, she would not have made her flight. But she wasn’t a teenager anymore. On the night she’d snuck away from home to join the caravan that would take her to the Hidden Schools and a life of sorcery, she’d held violent debates with herself about each object she might bring. Would this knife help more than that? How much dried meat would she need for the trail, which books? By the time she used, gods help her, a rope of knotted blankets to climb down from her bedroom window, she’d given more thought to her kit than most surgeons she had met in the years since gave to theirs. She could pack by habit now. Habit had filled the suitcase, habit used those stupid brightly colored organizers, habit snatched the letter from the end table and stuffed it in her inside pocket without reading it again. City lights burned too bright. She sat beside her suitcase and did not remember what was in it or how she’d reached the curb. She looked away from the moon, from Seril who was its goddess. The Silver Lady wanted to talk to her, but she did not want to talk back. Habit hailed a cab. As Tara’s cab passed the Ashen Quarter, something heavy landed on its roof, with as much delicacy as possible. The horse whinnied in terror; Tara pretended not to notice. When she looked down she realized that she’d clenched her hands into fists, and the glyphs cut into her arms were glowing. A stone talon tapped the window. “Go away, Shale,” she said. The talon reached down and opened the door, and limb by limb a lanky winged statue coiled himself into the cab. His furled wings pressed against Tara’s shoulder.