Calliope awoke on the shore of a cool rocky stream. Awoke wasn’t quite the right term, she returned to her senses. The back of her neck prickled with the warm sun and she rolled onto her back to stare up at the cerulean blue of the sky for a long minute, allowing her body to fully rejoin her mind. Once she felt strong she sat up. It was just passed mid-day and a cool wind was blowing out of the low brown hills that stretched off to the north. To the south lay desert, increasingly arid and sandy as one moved away from the foot of the hills and this stream which drained what little moisture collected there. Whirling tempests capered above those hills and Calliope’s exposed skin felt the chapping that her mind didn’t remember. The Ghost Fence of Ibn Kaydos stretched for almost a thousand mile and was fully a hundred miles thick. An ancient spell which cut off the Banian Caucuses from the northern deserts of Al’ardbahja. Esoteric legends said it had been constructed in the earliest days, when some great evil had driven the early tribes from the Caucues where they had once flourished. To cover the retreat of his people Ibn Kaydos and his Four Hundred Acolytes had conjured the Ghost Fence. A vast magical barrier to keep their enemy, whomever or whatever it had been, to the north. Such a working verged on the miraculous and could not have been replicated by the petty and divided mages of this later age. Travel through the Ghost Fence was impossible, within minutes it destroyed the sanity of even the most heavily warded minds, and it made no distinction between the living, dead, or demon. 

 

Calliope had seen the advantage at once, a barrier that the Ivan Deathbeloved and his minions could not cross. The Necromancer had been in hot pursuit of them since he learned of her completely fraudulent status as a holy priestess who could destroy the undead. The undead didn’t move as fast as the living, but they never rested and never tired. Short of reaching the coast, a thousand miles in any direction, this was the only way to out run him. Of course that left the problem of crossing the Ghost Fence themselves. Neil had provided the answer to that problem. If the living couldn’t cross, and the dead couldn’t cross, then what you needed was something in between. She had wrapped both their minds in Neil’s aura and put them in a kind of waking comma, imparting simple instructions to their bodies and to their horses to cross the Ghost Fence. It had been like going to sleep while drunk. Queasy but forgotten. And now they were across, or at least she was. She sat up and looked around for her horse and was relieved to find it clopping halfheartedly at a clump of scrubby grass. Probably the last easy sustenance before a long trek across the desert. 

 

“Neil?” she tried to say only to discover that her mouth was beyond parched from days of travel across the windswept hills, the scarf she had wrapped around her face having fallen off at some point. She stuck her face into the water and drank greedily. The tepid water almost painful against her parched throat and lips.

“Neil?” she called again and then caught sight of movement further down the shallow creek bed. His horse was still walking mechanically forward, sunk to its chest in a pool and unable, with its limited instructions, to get out. Neil sat atop the steed, staring sightlessly forward. She had been lucky he hadn’t fallen in and drowned in his sleep. Unsteadily she pushed herself to her feet. Her stomach shrieked that she hadn’t eaten in days. The blood stung her legs as she made her way down to the pool and splashed in. Placing a hand on both Neil and the horse she lifted the spell. Neil’ eyes flew open and the horse reared in sudden surprise, dumping the thief into the pool with a splash.