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“Let’s just get the hell out of here,” Raider said before Seth could speak.
Seth didn’t look happy, but he faced forward and led the way out.
They kept to the base of the rocky hills that hid the tunnels. If the sand serpent came after them, they would have to climb into the hills and try to find cover. Hopefully, it wouldn’t come to that. It shouldn’t. They were too small of prey to be worth that kind of effort.
If Raider was wrong about that, they were probably fucked. He, for one, wasn’t fit to run right now. Seth wasn’t in much better shape. His left knee was clearly stiff, and he had plenty of other minor injuries.
At least they were out of the deep sands of the Kesh. From here to Aqarat, they would be walking across more traversable hard pack.
Walking.
Damn it.
Raider hated that he’d lost Umae. She would be safe with the Sudai, but still.
They headed east along the rocky hills, which rose and fell until they became scattered humps of stone, some with a smattering of scrub. They didn’t talk, not for the first few hours while they stayed alert for the sand serpent.
When they were clearly out of range, Seth broke the long silence with, “I’m sorry about Umae.”
Of course Seth would be tracking that, how much the mare had meant to Raider. The Curator was way too observant.
Raider said tonelessly, “She’s safe with the Sudai.”
The same couldn’t be said of Seth’s horse. Maybe the bandits had gotten it. More likely, the sand serpent had. Raider thought about how Seth hadn’t wanted to name the animal, how careful he’d been to not get too attached.
Seth had been right; he’d been smart. Attachment meant loss. Pain. Raider glanced at Seth and away.
“They left us,” Seth observed, clearly surprised by that fact. “The Sudai.”
“Chief Karek would never risk the lives of his own people for either of us. He wouldn’t be a good chief, doing that.”
“I wouldn’t expect them to risk themselves for me, but they seemed to …”
When Seth trailed off, Raider filled in, “Care about me?”
“Well … yes.”
“There are different levels of caring,” Raider pointed out. “I think they do care about me on a certain level, but it only goes so far.”
Seth frowned, like that didn’t make sense to him.
Raider huffed and shook his head. “You’re so absolute. So black and white. Life isn’t like that.”
“It is for me.”
“You’re fucking impossible sometimes.”
Seth’s principles could be so exhausting, and Raider didn’t have the energy to debate them right now. Keeping his painful leg moving was taking most of his focus. He also had a headache and felt sick to his stomach. That was the venom, no doubt.
When Raider had leaped for the sand serpent’s head, hoping to get a blow in at the base of its skull, which legend held to be its only vulnerability, the creature had thrown him off. He had tumbled over the enormous coils of the snake’s body, gashing his leg on one of the spines. Any more than that glancing blow and the venom would undoubtedly have killed him. That creature had been made to destroy greater things than men. Its kind were relics, the Sudai claimed, of an ancient battle between the gods. Raider had managed to evade it and get back to Seth only because the creature had been too damn big to maneuver easily in the cavern.
Raider would probably start feeling grateful to be alive when he stopped feeling like shit. That, however, was not going to be today.
As he scrubbed sweat from his face with a kaftan sleeve, his improvised saddlebag-turned-pack lifted from his shoulder.
“Give this to me,” Seth ordered when Raider grabbed for it.
“Seth, no—”
