Wade walked to a narrow crack between two towering rock formations. So narrow it looked in the wrong light like nothing more than a shadow somebody had forgotten to erase. He crouched, disappeared inside. Follow me. His voice echoed back out.
One at a time, Nano, but it's safe. Grey Talon hesitated only a moment before following. The warriors came after single file, shoulders brushing rock on both sides. 30 men folding themselves into a crack in the earth on the word of a man. Half of them had wanted dead less than two days ago.
After 30 steps, the space opened. Wade lit the torch he'd left hidden in a crevice for this exact moment, and the light spilled out across the cavern. And every single person behind him went dead silent at once. An underground lake 100 feet across if it was an inch. Water so clear you could see clean down to the rock bottom, lit gold by the torchlight like something poured out of a different, kinder world.
A stream fed it steadily from a tunnel to the north, the sound of it running soft and constant through the whole cavern, the most beautiful sound Wade figured most of these people had heard in longer than a year. Grey Talon walked to the water's edge, knelt, touched it with one hand, brought his fingers to his lips. Fresh water, he said. Just that, his voice, for the first time since Wade had met him, cracking clean down the middle. Pure, cold.
It never runs dry, Wade said quietly. Two years I've watched it through the worst of this drought. It just keeps coming. Enough for your whole tribe. More than enough.
The chief turned to look at him, and in his eyes now was something Wade had never once expected to see on that stone face. Tears. actual tears cutting tracks through two days worth of dust. Our people are dying of thirst, Grey Talon said, voice barely holding. Our animals die. The streams we've known our whole lives have gone dry one by one.
And you, you have kept this, guarded it, and now you hand it to us. It's my gift, Wade said. To prove what I told you, that my heart's true. Behind him, one of the older warriors spoke low, urgent in Apache. His voice thick with something between disbelief and reverence.
Grey Talon, translated without being asked. Greyhawk says, "This water is a gift from the spirits, says his people have searched 50 years for something like it. That children have died of thirst in that time. Elders while the sun burned the whole earth dry around them." Wade said nothing.
There wasn't anything worth saying to that. Some silences, a man learns, are meant to be left exactly as they are. But not every warrior in that cavern looked at Wade the way Greyhawk did. One man stood apart near the tunnel entrance, arms folded, face carved from something harder than the rest, older than Wolfrunner, younger than Grey Talon. A long scar ran from his jaw down into his collar, the kind of scar a man only earns fighting for his life more than once.