#taliyah

“You’re getting the hang of it!” Taliyah shouts back at me, her angular brown face split in a cheerful grin.

‘It’ is the best surprise I’ve had since I first set foot on sand. The sand-rider creaks beneath me as I angle the sail; it’s all that’s left of my wind-glider, repurposed and certainly added to. Think of it as a makeshift raft mostly cobbled together from the bones of weird animals with what little usable wood is available all strung together with sinew and ropes and it’s skating and hissing across the surface of the sands, steered only by the big shark-fin of a sail I made from my glider, controlled by the tug and twist of the ropes in my hands—

But the reason it’s moving at all is her.

I’d pretty much pegged the life of a desert nomad to be a quiet, boring, miserable existence of trekking across scorching sands, bonking scrawny lizards on the head with rocks for food, eking out a meagre trade in whatever stuff you could make out here with whatever occasional human contact you might run into and hoping they didn’t turn out to be murderous bandits.

I never imagined there’d be a good dozen of us slithering across the dunes at great speed on these dry-land-surfboards, propelled by the sands themselves–shifting, undulating, rolling like the waves of a waterless ocean–and all compelled by the whims and gracefully weaving hands of one young desert mage leading the pack.

Taliyah’s arms are raised, her wide red sleeves billowing wildly in the wind, her thick, soft brown bush of hair rippling, and her hands darting and flowing like a Piltie maestro conducting an orchestra or an Ionian mystic doing her morning katas…

Except her music is the Earth, and where she weaves, it follows. She’s not even on a sand-rider; she needs her hands free, no tugging ropes for her.

No, she’s surfing across the desert, faster than the swiftest Bilgewater windsail, on a freakin’ slab of rock.

One of the kids whoops with laughter, wobbling on his board to her left; an old lady behind us is singing merrily as she weaves around the few dead bones and deader bushes that dare hinder our path with a lifetime’s experience and skill.

The life these people lead—so completely stripped of all the shit that everyone else kills and dies for—terrifies me. I can’t imagine it being mine, I’m itching like a trapped cat even in the short time I’ve been with them…

But moments like these stab it in my heart and twist; a truth.

The pirates waxed lyrical about the freedom of the sea; the horizon and the endless blue. No kings but the Captain, no borders, no walls but the creaking wood of the hull. No power ruling you but the whims of wind and wave. Livin’ with ’em, though, truth was, every last one of them was tangled in the brutal food chain of Bilgewater—little fish eaten by bigger fish unless they found a way to eat them first—and bound by codes and rules and the gleam of gold and gunmetal, enslaved to greed, ambition, an unslakable thirst.

No one loved the sea more than Fortune, and no-one was deeper in its Kraken’s grip than her.

Even Neeko, my adorable Neeko, was bound to the complex tangle of lives and deaths that was her jungle home, to her curiosity about the outside world, her hunger for companionship, and the aching, impossible yearning of being the last of her kind…

But here? Taliyah, and the people she’s protecting? Out here, with nothing but the sand and the wind and each other’s loving smiles…?

First people I’ve ever met who might be truly free.

They’re also the only ones who know the safest and swiftest ways through the Great Sai—well, ‘safe’ being a relative term–and the relative part is why they need me.

The desert’s as deadly as it is bleakly beautiful. It has a million zillion ways to kill you; heat, thirst, starvation, delirium, sunstroke, those are just the boring ones! A lot of the more interesting ones have all kinds of teeth.

And the Sai’s scariest teeth aren’t even from this world.

Taliyah’s the only one this little family of travellers could find to protect them who’s got any kind of battle experience with monsters like that and the magic to back it up. But we’re shortcutting, with some urgency, through the nastiest part of the north Sai, and even she can’t protect them, or herself, alone. They need my firepower as much as I need their experience. Neither of us is making it to the other side without the other.

And that’s how the desert builds its bonds.

“Go gently!” Taliyah calls to me, “You don’t have to be so erratic! Let the wind and the sand guide you—feel them—the sand–rider will become part of your body!”

I’ve never met someone as unencumbered as this girl. She’s young, but if I dismissed her as naïve I’d be the idiot–she’s been places and seen things the loudmouth Piltie explorers’ club wouldn’t get near in their wildest opium dreams–she just has this way of keeping the best of each memory and letting the rest flow away into the winds, like sand through her fingers…

And she’s warm, compassionate, friendly, funny, humble, courageous, and wise beyond her years on top of all that.

I’ve never been so envious of someone who has, and needs, so little.

“Jinx!” she pulls me out of my reverie, as we skirt closer to a few outcroppings of jagged grey-brown stone angling out of the endless golden sand, “Watch this!”

And with a flash of a dark-eyed wink, the little Stoneweaver sweeps her hands up–and one of those slabs of rock rushes up out of the sand ahead of her and flattens into a giant rocky ramp—

Just in time for the slab she’s coasting on to strike it with a scraping clack and hiss and launch her like she was an Undercity skateboarder on a Sump-pipe.

Taliyah soars into the air, trailing plumes of sand and fragments of stone, whooping with effervescent joy. She’s silhouetted in that blazing blue sky for a glorious moment in motion, squinting out the desert sun in her shadow, and then she’s twisting–into a torpedo loop, her stony trail whirling into an artistic spiral after her–wobbling only slightly as she slaps down into the dunes in a fountain of sandy wake, yelping and then bubbling furious laughter.

The nomads behind us whoop and cheer for her and she launches each of them, one by one, on smaller, safer ramps, to share in her joyful game.

I grin and sail closer to her, close enough to get a good look at her. She glances back when it’s my turn, with a wiggle of her brows. Smug, self-satisfied little showoff. She’s too freakin’ cute.

“Betcha a roast lizard I can get higher!” I shout over the rushing sands, “Watch me!”

“Oh, really?” Taliyah laughs, “Be careful, Jinx! Know your limits!”

“Limits?!” I sneer, “Ain’t found ’em yet! Watch and learn, Rocky!”

Oh yeah, she’s one cool chick, Taliyah, shaping the earth itself with the power of thought, creativity and will. But I got those, things, too, even if I don’t got the magic. My magic’s right here, strapped to my sand-rider in easy reach in case of ambush, a six-and-a-bit foot metal shark dragon rabbit from hell that’s actually a whole lotta guns.

I was even smart enough to face him backward.

I kick a lever with a lash of my foot, yank my ropes to position me as I hear the clunk and then the pulsing roar of jets priming. Glance behind me–I’m weaving away from them, none of the nomads are in range, they’ve seen me do crazy shit before and they know the alarming tones of my excitement and that they mean to stay well back.

Oh yeah. Jinx gotta Jinx.

“Brace for awesome, Desert Divas, here comes the show!” I drop my ropes, crab-hop onto Rhino’s back saddle and squat until my gut’s scorching on his metal plates–then I signal Taliyah with a wave and a loud shout–“RAMP ME!”

Her eyes widen, but she does–and when I feel the very first shift from sand to slippery stone under my sand-rider’s belly–I launch the rocket jets behind me.

The desert lights up with a rainbow bloom of toxic Chemtech colours. Heat washes over me from behind, a stinging rain of sand needling into my shoulders, my back, my hair–ow, prolly shoulda seen that coming–and then the wave of concussive force hits me and the sand-rider and I shoot up that stony ramp screaming and laughing and spear into the sky over Shurima—

My cheeks are peeled back from my eyeballs, my lips from my teeth, my breath is shoved right down the back of my throat by the speed. My stomach feels like it flies out my toes.

And everything slows to a heartbeat, and I see the desert for what it really is—not the boring endless wasteland it looks at ground level—but an artist’s gorgeous earth-toned canvas of contours and waves and the shapes of wind and stone reflected in the cloudless blue.

Sure is pretty up here.

“JINX!” Taliyah’s crying out, warning me—

And then gravity remembers me, Rhino tips downward, my insides are trying to escape out my back, the sand’s rushing toward my face in a blur. But it’s okay. Tali’s got my back. I know she’ll do some wacky magic sand wizard shit to catch me—

I’m so busy howling my mad, gleeful delight at my own stupid reckless awesomeness that I never see the massive shadow bursting from the sands at my left.

Never see the enormous jaws of the worm-beetle-shark-lamprey-thing widening, sandfalls gushing from sawblade teeth on multiple flapping jaws–swooping to swallow my tiny, noisy, tasty-looking morsel of a Jinx like a cat darting to grab a passing bird.

It’s the first time Taliyah of the Nasaaj saves my life.

It won’t be the last.