Inveigle

 I left the Hotel Borealis around noon; the receptionist was the same on who’d checked me in the previous day and she looked tired, as though she’d been on shift continuously since I’d arrived.  She lifted her eyes from whatever she was looking at behind the long, steel counter just long enough to identify me and sneer, and then her attention returned to whatever it was that was more interesting.  I considered wishing her a pleasant day and decided against it.  I do not like raising my voice unless there is no other choice and she was far enough away from me that I would have needed to shout.

The heat from the desert hit me like a wall.  I hadn’t noticed the air-conditioning in the hotel once I’d adjusted to its internal temperature, but now outside again the difference was apparent.  The heat was dry but breathing felt difficult at first: I found myself gasping as though the air were somehow thinner instead of just drier, and it only gradually subsided.  I kept walking while I adjusted though and soon stepped out of the shade of the hotel’s colonnade and into the full midday blast of heat and light.  It was less of a shock than leaving the hotel had been, but it was still another shock; enough that I reconsidered leaving the hotel at all.  But the city in the pillars that I had seen last night under the borealis would be treacherous at any time, and at night I’d be hard pressed to see what was coming.

I should, I realised belatedly, have taken water with me.  Instead I strode manfully across red sand that crunched underfoot like cinders and headed north-west with the bravado of an idiot.  After half an hour the city was still nowhere in sight and I was sweating copiously; sweat ran down either side of my nose, behind my ears and down the back of my neck, wicked from my scalp by my hair.  My clothes were soaked through; small patches of sweat had grown and merged and now my shirt clung unpleasantly to my skin and my shorts felt heavy and clammy.  Thirst was increasing; my throat was dry despite my sweat and I found myself licking my upper lip frequently, trying to pick up the salty sweat before it evaporate.  The sun beat down overhead, a constant reminder that what I was doing was foolish, and each footstep trudged a little further away from coolness, water, and civilisation.

Two hours and some handful of minutes had passed by the time I struggled into the shadow of a tall stone column and while the temperature difference wasn’t that great it was enough to afford me temporary relief.  The stone was wind- and weather-worn but still towered above me.  Shading my eyes from the afternoon sun and staring up until my neck hurt I estimated that the column was eight, perhaps nine metres tall, and if the city was three thousand years old then it must have been over ten metres when it was constructed.  The stone was rough to the touch and warm and if anything had ever been carved into it it had eroded away long since.  Beyond it were hints of stone paving beneath shifting red sand and, a little further along still, were two stone lumps that might have been animals once.

There was no sign of any water, though I was probably still outside the old city limits.  Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that whatever water had once flowed here might have dried up as the millenia passed and I estimated that I might make it back to the hotel without collapsing but only if I stayed here less than an hour.  And probably less if I couldn’t find shade to stay in.

A sensible man would have turned back at that point and remade his plans to come back another day.  I, however, wiped my forehead and licked my fingers to try and conserve some water, however futile the gesture, and stepped back out into the furnace of the desert afternoon and continued into the city.

Even up close I couldn’t make out what animals or objects the next two stone lumps might once have been, but carved beneath the left-most one, in letters now only shallowly incised, were runes that I slowly translated to read Inveigle.  A name, or an instruction?  As I pondered my ears registered a regular tapping sound, something both familiar and confusing.  It took nearly thirty seconds before I finally identified as the sound of water dripping.