Walking the Dust
18: Into The Peaks
The time I visited Dry Flats was the second time I went to the Suntop Peaks.
The first time, I didn't find much. Just a few villages, people subsisting on goats and dogs, and lots of tall tales about the West coast. Not that any of them had ever seen the coast, of course — to the best of my knowledge, no-one has. But everyone says there's a coast out there, somewhere beyond the deadlands, that leads out to the Endless Water.
Father mentioned it a few times, and Jerod also heard people talking about it. But neither of them tried to find it while they were out there, and I can't say I blamed them. When folks call a place 'the deadlands', you can bet there's a good reason for it.
So after I skimmed the mountains, I headed back inland. But it was shortly afterwards that I met my first Sunner, and then quite a few more as I made my way around the desert. And I realised that there was something else out there, in the mountains themselves.
The Sun-Singers will tell you that the Suntop Peaks are Sunner country, where their faith began, started by a man they call Fire Walker. What exactly that means, I could never get a straight answer to. All they would tell me was that this Fire Walker guy was the first Sunner.
I was starting to get the impression that nobody actually knew for sure, and they were just goatshitting me with vague answers to sound more knowledgeable than they really were.
That wasn't good enough for me. I wanted to know.
But the next problem was that none of the Singers would give me an actual location, or a name. They all just kept saying it was “in the Suntop Peaks.”
So I started asking every Sunner I met, Singer or not, and eventually found a consensus; it started in a town called Sunspot, somewhere high up in the mountains. That was all anybody knew, or at least all they would tell me. Where in the mountains? No idea. To the North, or South? Nobody had a clue.
Now, the Suntop Peaks are pretty damned big, and by all accounts not that many people live there. Even I wasn't about to walk the whole length on the off chance I might find something. So I put it to the back of my mind, and carried on elsewhere.
By the time I went back West again, further South than I did the first time, I'd forgotten all about it. But then I came across Dry Flats, and old man Brode, and his secret black goop recipe. And they were all Sunners.
So I tried Brode for answers, hoping that by being close to the Peaks he might have more of an idea. Sure enough, he'd been told it was this place called Sunspot, too. No, he didn't know where it was. But he believed it wasn't that far, maybe a week or two on foot from his town.
He seemed pretty sure it was on the Southern end of the mountains, but I could tell he wasn't really sure.
By now all the questions that I'd had back East were burning me up. Like, why wouldn't the Singers just tell me this? Why was everything about where it started such a big secret? Why did nobody seem to know where exactly this town was?
(I'd even tried asking non-Sunners for the location at one point, but none of them had heard of the place.)
So I decided this was it. I couldn't ignore it any more, and now I had two reasons to head into the mountains.
First, I was going to find Sunspot. And then I was going to cross the deadlands, to reach the Endless Water.
So after the foot caravan left Dry Flats, I said my goodbyes. Before I could leave, Brode took me aside. “Why?” He asked. “What do you think you will find?”
“Because I want to know,” I said. “Because I need to know. It's what I do.”
“You could die out there. The Suntop Peaks are an unforgiving place.”
I smiled. “Or I could die right here from sunstroke or a scorpion bite. Either way, I'm dead.”
“Then I hope you find what you're looking for.”
He wished me a safe journey, embraced me with his black-stained hands, then walked away.
And so did I. Into the West.
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