Pyna stood, and swept slowly over the powdery onyx sand-crest, soft as a sultry mist.
A wraith of milky marble and ribboned jet.
Do not
Stray
Far from
Me
Umin pressed his frost-light deep into his boot and drew his short-blade with a resigning sigh. Then crawled and rolled over the dune’s atrous and iodic spine, fast upon Pyna’s heels.
“Ahh, me…
Bold it be then…”
Rivers of night-dark grit followed them in silty ribbons down the dune-face where Umin stepped and sank, while Pyna’s toes left nary a trace.
Fifteen wary paces out, and figures in the camp below appeared to bestir like a hive of unquiet bees.
It would seem that a soundless alarum had been raised.
Twenty paces down the yielding dune face, there followed the terrible, ligneous knock of a bolt loosed from somewhere out the enfolding gloom.
“Pyna!” Umin hissed.
She twisted, like flowing milk and tar.
The feather-bolt gleamed as it struck the obsidian grit, throwing up angry particulate at the ghost of where she should have been.
Instead, Umin heard Pyna’s spare laughter from where she was, suddenly ten paces to his left.
Her hands, she thrust into the sands, and plucked out a struggling figure. From beneath the concealing folds of a darkly knit tarpaulin, spread upon the seeping slope.
Umin raced as deftly as he was able towards her, kicking up puffs of bitumen-black dust.
He could hear the soft but swift, sandy footfalls of figures moving up the dune-skirts from below.
And winced at the reverberating winch and muffled click as another bolt slid into its cradle.
When he reached Pyna, she held a squat, raucously flame-bearded fellow by the shoulders.
At least twice her girth, with arms like braided hemp.
He was suspended on his tip-toes as she smiled up at him, as warmly as though she had just snared a slippery silver-fish from a pleasant forest-pond.
“Blood worm…” He spat at her through a froth of inky grit against his lip. His face, a deeply lined landscape of rancor and helpless horror.
Pyna’s little bow-smile bent ghastly-sweet.
Where there
Is blood
There
Is
Healing
She then tossed him like frayed sack-cloth towards his approaching companions.
Not fiercely enough though, to crack anything other than his pride, as he landed in a ponderous puff of atrous particulate, and night-dark dust.
Unkindness
Breeds
Beasts
And your bows
And blades are
Unkind…
His companions, four of them, now converged on Pyna and Umin.
Crossbows menacing. Their features secreted behind salt-veils, and the muted colours of stiff, heavy sea-robes.
The squat soul with the copper locks and fiery beard dragged himself from the sand, coughing a mouthful of dusty darkness.
“Fendin, are you harmed…”
“Nah! She’s a gentle one, this nightmare.” Red-beard muttered and spat.
Umin reached out and delicately caught Pyna by her marmoreal wrist.
“Friends…
We would bargain."
One of the figures snorted.
“This is how you bargain?”
Red-beard spat, and laughed like dry twigs cavorting.
“Leave off Yunik, I did loose first…
Very well!”
He ran thick, knotty fingers through his copper tangles, discharging another hail of stygian particles.
“I cannot conceive!
Of what you would bargain with...”
Red-beard squinted at the unlikely pair as he ground his molars.
Umin licked cotton-dry lips - desiring nothing so much as a drip, a sip of gelid water - still holding fast to Pyna’s wrist.
Her flesh, cool and strange between his fingers - stone made supple - as she characteristically loomed like a rag-doll propped upright in the inky sand.
“Umin, Guildsman, of the Gate of Candles…
And this…”
My mother named me Pyna…
“Pyna…” Umin frowned and nodded.
Red-beard guffawed.
“A Guildsman!
And an, abomination…
Sojourning alone across the lifeless and thirsty Siffaq.”
“That tale alone, may well be worth its weight in passage.”
Pyna smiled her little-bow smile.
Where is
Sendrin…
Red-beard grunted, and scrunched the lined landscape of his face into mountainous crags and vales.
“What do you, know of Sendrin?”
Father
Knows
well
Take us to
Where he
Dwells
“Soon enough!
My most pale lady…”
“Soon enough…
Come then!”
Crossbows still cocked and angry, Umin and Pyna were ensconced at a wary distance between the party of corsairs.
Together they descended the yielding, sifting onyx-dark dune face, and down into the chiaroscuro wrack of their inchoate encampment.
