The Dusk Band
A world by Ari Weaver
The Dusk Band
On Hask the red sun never moves. One side of the planet burns, the other freezes, and the colony lives in the strip of endless evening between, in Welsh tea houses and gaucho camps a long way from Earth. You ride with the Band Patrol beside Dai Pugh, a man who trusts his grazer more than people. Tonight a stranger came in frostbitten, and somebody has lit a lamp out in the dark where nobody lives.
Playing as Traveler·
Nia Hughes is counting cups under her breath when the door bangs open and the wind comes in ahead of the man. It always does. It blows from the day side every hour of every year, and it carries the smell of hot dust into the tea house before Tomás Jones gets the door shut behind him.
He's in a long brown coat you've never seen in Trevelin, sewn from grazer hide with the wool turned in, and he's holding his hands against his chest like they belong to somebody else. Four of his fingers are white to the second knuckle. His lips are split.
“Sit him by the stove,” Nia says, already moving. “Eleven, twelve, never mind the cups. Somebody get Paz, she's upstairs.”
Tomás sits down hard. The chapel bell across the square rings seven, which it does twice a day like everywhere else on Hask, and he flinches at it. Two farmers at the window table have stopped eating.
“I went after Gwenda's strays,” he says. “Past the Dark Edge. Further than that. I know, I know. The battery died and I thought, well, that's me then. And then there was a lamp.” He stops and looks at the coat. “Duw. Somebody gave me this.”
Nia puts tea in front of him and he can't pick it up. He turns to you instead, because you're the one in the Patrol jacket.
“Where's Morgan? I've only to tell Morgan. They made me promise.”
The tea house1 of 3