“All praise to Asham on this fine morning!” says Jaruna.
I rouse myself awake, not sure if I was asleep to begin with.
I must have been because Kripa and Hatvan have already half-disassembled our tent. Kiddu is up and dressed in her native get-up and veil. It’s hard to tell but she looks chipper talking to Jaruna.
“We’re not even inside the sharuq yet?”
“It is difficult to say. It is not as though the sharuq has a definite boundary. I suppose you could say the sharuq begins at the moment it becomes impossible to walk through the sandstorm.
“It gets worse?”
“It is said that the dusk is always darkest before the dawn.”
When all the tents are packed up, Dronaja leads the columns of men and women into the haze and after just a few cubits their forms start to vanish in the dust. We try to follow them.
Eventually the wind becomes so fierce that I can no longer move against it. The columns ahead have stopped anyway. I have to crouch low or the wind catches my robe and throws me backwards.
Kiddu shouts something at Jaruna but the mystic either can’t hear her or chooses to ignore her.
The sand is worse down low. It cuts into my face and hands. I pull the elastic on my hood so tight that there’s only a coin-sized opening in front of the bridge of my nose. But sand flecks still manage to get in, so I just squeeze my eyes shut and sit there, motionless and blind.
Then I hear a distinct new whistling sound—followed by a loud incantation.
“Vayastra!”
This time Jaruna shoots his wind astra forward, not behind—and the glowing arrow carves out a tunnel of clean air, deep into the sharuq.
I open my eyes and relax my hood. I can see! I can even breathe.
We walk into the tunnel of air.
At every step the sharuq presses against our tunnel, threatening to drown us all in choking debris. The effect is dizzying, like being in a long narrow cave with walls of swirling dust instead of rock. This miasma of particles rushes over our heads screaming a thousand discordant howls.
The winds are so loud that I can barely hear Jaruna shout the astra incantation again. A second green-white arc shoots over my head and broadens the passageway, reinforces against the intruding chaos.
I’m terrified. It feels like we’re being swallowed by some enormous creature of the air. Or the storm from my nightmares.
The slow predictable rhythm of the desert march gives way to a back-and-forth struggle into the sandstorm. Each astra is a desperate gulp of breath. I clutch Kiddu’s arm with both of my hands.
Just as I’m starting to get used to this claustrophobic screaming corridor I notice the line of natives ahead start to weave around something on the ground.
It’s a spindly plant, frighteningly red. Vines connect bulbous orbs covered in fine hair.
As I pass I see the hairs are actually spines. And that they are covered in decaying insect corpses.
Jaruna shouts into my ear: “Blood cactus! Do not touch it! It will paralyze you!”
The ground soon is covered with a labyrinth of the blood cacti, the vines like veins and arteries lashing together the heartlike spiny bulbs, each one coated in dried out insects. Some of these corpses are as big as my hand.
Jaruna shoots another wind astra and in the gust of fresh air a blood cactus vine tears free and whips in front of my face like a tentacle.
I skirt this, fingers digging into Kiddu’s arm, and come inches away from a waist-high bulb growth. A huge scorpion, still living, is impaled on the spines, arms and tail writhing as the plant sucks out its juice.
As I watch this grisly scene another flying insect tumbles into the same huge cactus bulb, swept into the plant’s deathtrap by the blowing winds.
I almost faint. Kiddu nudges me with her shoulder.
We march so slow through this sunless nightmare world that time itself becomes sluggish, its flow clogged. The omnipresent yellow dust clouds above and around slowly darken, fading into the color of bile.
I wonder if Jaruna has brought enough arrows. What if we get trapped here for the night? Or forever?
Finally, a wind astra extends our tunnel of air—and in the distance, at the end of the tunnel, I think I can see an open sky.