Chapter Thirteen
The blackness behind Jack’s eyelids begins to redden and he opens them. The sun is rising. They had limped a ways and collapsed behind a viny stone partition, and as he sits up and yawns, disoriented, the dried cake of blood on his face cracks and flakes away like the faces of the old porcelain figurines on the floor of the hollowed-out mansion. Lia sits next to him, hugging her knees to her chest, and looks upon him tranquilly. A single rivulet of dirty crimson trails down the left side of her face.
“Were you watching me sleep?”
She nods warmly. “We need to clean you up.”
She helps him to his feet and they stumble out into the open and look around at the cloudless day. Rainworn concrete walls lay embedded in the earth like the monoliths of some occult formation, leaning over in rough lines and arcs across the meadow, as if the whole arrangement were laid out carefully on ancient ley lines by astrological mystics. They tread through it wordlessly, carrying no bow, no map, no provisions.
As they walk, frames and flickers of motion from the night’s assault flash through their minds in a psychedelic bazaar. Jack tries to push it away, and he conjures in its place a vague replica of the map they lost, trying in vain to reconstruct mentally the lines and symbols. His head throbs and he gives up. Lia swivels about as if every feature of the landscape poses an imminent threat. Past the violent imagery and the ringing in their ears, the only steady thought that pierces the fog of their minds is how sorely they miss Balazir.
They curve west and go toward the beach. Groves of palm trees stretch and tilt toward the sun’s slanted pathway like enormous dandelions straining for the light. Sandpipers play at the water’s edge, and Jack and Lia doff their reeking boots, slog through the sand, and wade out into the brewing froth and immerse themselves in the cold morning swell. Lia bends forward and soaks her ratty hair, working the strands between her fingers to wash out the grime, and she feels daintily around the sore patch where a fistful of it was crudely ratcheted away. Jack flips over and backstrokes away from the coast. He slackens his body and allows the ocean to carry him on its current, and he rolls and tumbles with a passing wave. As the water stills, he bobs up and down and looks back toward the shore where Lia paddles and splashes around, backlit and bathed in solar radiance, her lacerated nightgown sheer and clinging. Jack submerges and pistons his legs through the turbulent water, tendrils of wavering kelp brushing against his body. Back in the shallows he puts his feet down and walks upright through the plush sand.
“Come here,” says Lia.
Jack goes to her and she runs her fingertips across the swelling around his eyes and the fresh cut on his cheek. She unwinds the wrapping around his forearm and takes the bandages off his chest and cleanses them, then scoops up handfuls of saltwater and splashes it onto his wounds. Delicately she traces her fingers over the punctures and cuts and he pulls her close and holds her. She nuzzles against the crook of his neck and they breathe deeply in each other’s arms as the ebbing water laps around their waists.
“Maybe you were right.”
“About what?”
“That they’re wicked,” she says. Jack’s face grows stormy. “You’re not sorry, are you… that you killed him?”
“No. I wish I could kill him every day for the rest of my life, but it wouldn’t bring our parents back.”
“At least he won’t kill anybody ever again.”
“Yeah,” Jack says flatly, thinking on the scores of young warriors ready and eager to take Halis’s place. As he looks at Lia, he thinks again how close he came to losing her and his heart feels heavy and sore. He brushes a wet slither of hair from her forehead and kneads her soft earlobe between his thumb and forefinger. She looks up at him with glistening brown eyes that contain a depth of innocence Jack fears he may never know again, the light and graceful purity of never having killed. He traces his lips across hers and they fall against each other urgently, conveying themselves in a silent language more ancient than the perished world that surrounds them.
They tread back to the shore, whispering low to each other though no soul breathes anywhere near that may overhear them. The thin, scalloped beach is strewn with tangles of kelp and driftwood and water-worn bits of shell and they walk across it, hand-in-hand, and climb back to the grassy shelf where their boots lay airing in the breeze. They lie on their backs and let the warm sun dry the saltwater off their skin and soaked clothing, closing their eyes and sinking into the cool earth and feeling the minute scrabbling of tiny insects marching through the grass beneath them. Lia feels something land on her arm, with legs as soft as eyelashes, and she lies perfectly still and lets it explore the inner bend of her elbow for a spell, then it takes wing again and flies off with a buzz that tickles her ears.
By and by, they peel themselves off the ground and leave behind two well-formed impressions of their bodies in the soft grass, with a little bridge between where their hands had clasped. They sit cross-legged, knees touching, and mend each other. Lia smoothes out the stained strip of cloth that serves as a wrapping for Jack’s arm and winds it round and round, tying it off gently at his wrist. He sits quietly and watches her work. She turns around, her back facing Jack, and he pulls the strap of her nightgown off her shoulder and swathes it with a long cloth that he weaves under her armpit and over the soft pronouncement of her clavicle, spreading it out flat so it covers every rank puncture. They work slowly and deliberately, completing each small motion with meditative concentration.
When their ministrations are complete, they stand and face southward. Their feet do not carry them forward. They simply stare off with the same long-range deadpan common to carnivorous hunters. They look past the rippling expanse, beyond the faraway mountain ranges gracing the horizon like brushstrokes, deeper and farther than the human eye can afford to see, and they imagine it there, Alexandria, the place that knows things, and each evokes in their own mind a vision of its beauty, their manifestations rivaled only by the greatest palaces of history gone by, a castle with spires of gold, or perhaps a floating city replete with meandering canals and monuments that bear testimony to the aspirations of highest spirit, and they can feel it breathing out there in the far-flung reaches… and it beckons them forth, and with tender boundless yearning they advance.
The manacles are not needed. Phoebe cowers in the corner like a fearstruck doe in the midst of a lion pride, too frightened to move, and the hammered iron cuffs lay coiled at her side, unfastened. Warriors have been circulating through the keep all morning, but she has grown accustomed to their presence in her years at the Temple and she does not recoil from them. The raving man shackled to the wall, however, terrifies her deeply. His body is more gruesomely broken than anything her lowliest nightmares have manufactured, and she shudders with revulsion each time he addresses her with his manic pleading eyes and dead wretched voice.
“I’m not gonna let them hurt you,” he tells her, and she pulls herself into a tighter ball and buries her face in her folded arms and wheezes out a dry, keening sob. He will break free of his bondage, she is sure of it, and descend upon her like some feral gore-coated monster from one of the vile netherworlds she has been lectured to endlessly about. He is an emissary of the dark spirits of Fire, she believes, sent to reclaim her mortal flesh as punishment for some unknown offense. “I promise you,” Renning says, “I won’t let them kill you.” She blocks out his pleas and hums under her breath a lilting song of refuge meant to bring shelter and safekeeping.
Her tiny serenade feathers lightly through the dismal keep and a few of the craftsmen look up from their work and strain to hear above the wet slap-scrape of mortar being smeared across the courses of the stone barrier, captivated by her fitful rendition. As the song ends, her voice weakens and fades away and they turn their somber faces back to the work at hand. Their construction now follows a discernible layout, rows of stone cells lined up around a central corridor, receding all the way back to the furthest wall of the keep.
A familiar female voice carries from the antechamber and Phoebe rouses herself and looks toward the door.
“Let me in,” Ezbeth demands. “I want to see her.”
“No one is allowed in, I’m sorry.”
“Not allowed? I’ve never been forbidden anywhere in this Temple before. What have you done to her?”
“Nothing.”
“Then let me in to see.”
“You’ll have to wait for Keslin or King Nezra.”
“I’ll get them myself.” Her haughty footsteps rise in pitch as she ascends the staircase.
Renning’s chains jingle as he adjusts his posture, and for a long span the slapping and scraping of the masons are the only other sounds that permeate the keep. Phoebe is worn silent and she twirls a strand of hair vacantly.
Ezbeth returns at last, with Nisaq and Keslin, and the keep door is opened wide for them. She elbows past the sentries and rushes to the scared child in the corner.
“It’s okay, sweetie, Ezbeth’s got you.”
“Get her away from there,” Keslin says.
Two sentries walk heedfully toward Ezbeth and take her by the elbows and try gently to pry her away.
“Get your hands off me.”
“Leave the child be, Ezbeth. You’ve seen her, she’s alive, now leave it be. This isn’t your place.”
“The care of these children is most certainly my place. More mine than yours, and I’m taking her out of here.”
“No. You’ll leave her where she is.”
“What is wrong with you? What is this?”
“We don’t all get to play at games and maid work, Ezbeth, some of us are charged with defending this Temple, and I take that charge very seriously.”
“Defending us from this child? What’s happened to you?”
“They’ve brought their sickness here is what’s happened, and we’re going to dig it out.”
Ezbeth backs away from Phoebe and relents. The sentries release their grip. She rubs her elbows and scowls about the room at Keslin and the sentries. Hard, matronly creases run down the sides of her mouth.
“I have never been treated this way,” she says. Nisaq stands with his arms folded and watches acutely, his placid face betraying nothing. Ezbeth levels on him, pleading for an ally. “What about you?”
“I’m not sure this is any of our business. I’d just as soon not know what goes on down here.”
“How can you say that? After all we’ve done for them, the lengths we’ve gone through to rescue them, to bring them here and shape them into… into good people… only to have them locked down here and… and…”
“Please listen to her,” Renning croaks. The entire assemblage turns and looks at him, his head raised limply from wasted shoulders. “Please take this girl out of here.”
“See now, Ezbeth?” says Keslin. “See what you’ve done? You’re interfering with our work down here and I’ll ask you again to leave.”
“I’ll tell you,” says Renning, “I’ll tell you everything. Just please let her go.”
“There, Keslin, you’ve gotten what you wanted… now let the child go free.”
“He’s lying.”
“Nisaq?” she pleads again. His face remains stony.
The slews of craftsmen work their trowels aimlessly, slopping mortar on the floor and leveling over areas they’ve already covered. Their faces are ruddy orange by the light of the flickering work lanterns and their ghostly visages look on with rapt conviction, absorbing every sight they see, and they shoot each other ominous glances when Arana enters the keep surrounded by his retinue of guards. He stops next to Nisaq and flicks his eyes around at the odd gathering.
“Ezbeth is here to check on the well-being of the girl,” says Keslin, “and she is satisfied and she is now leaving.”
She gives Keslin a dirty glare then strides to the threshold. “King Arana,” she says impertinately. “Is this what your father would have done? Torture children?”
“My father is not here.”
“She’s not even nine years, Arana.”
“Ezbeth, I think you’d best let this drop,” says Nisaq, his voice deep and comforting.
“Children, Nisaq. How can you let them do this to children?”
“No one likes it, Ezbeth, but I’m afraid the times call for it.”
She lets out an exasperated sigh. Arana places his arm benevolently around her shoulder and leads her to the antechamber.
“I’m sorry, but they can’t be trusted. Their lives are not worth ours and I won’t have them put my family at risk.”
“But—I’ve put my life into making them civilized. I’ve cared for them.”
“They’re calling on dark spirits,” Keslin counters. He looks briefly to Arana, a knowing tell in his eyes. “They must be. It’s why all this has happened. They’ve brought their dirty rituals here with them and set up practice at our Temple.”
Keslin’s volley stuns Ezbeth and she works her stubborn jaw, trying to work out a response. “We’ve… we’ve unlearned them… we’ve scrubbed it all out of them.”
“You haven’t. Not completely.”
“There’s no way to know what they’re hiding.”
“I haven’t the barest hint that they’re hiding anything. I don’t know what more you want, I don’t know what more can be done for them.”
“Nothing more can be done. The matter is settled.”
“Is this your will,” she asks Arana, “or is it Keslin’s?”
She awaits no response and pushes briskly past and mounts the stairs as quickly as her withering legs will carry her. Arana watches her leave, confounded by her outburst. Keslin grins with sportive amusement.
“I’ll talk with her,” says Nisaq.
“Please.”
He nods loyally and ascends the stairs with dignified grace.
“She’ll come around,” says Keslin. “That talk of Fire will get her.”
“Mmm,” says Arana, squinting off philosophically. “And you? Do you think they call on dark spirits?”
“I think they’re raised as animals, and I don’t think you can tear it out of them no matter how hard you try. Whatever they’re calling on… it’s no good. But it doesn’t matter—either way, they’re not to be trusted.”
“No.”
“Now…” Keslin steps back into the keep and holds the door for Arana like a dutiful porter. “I believe our man is finally ready to talk to us.”
“Send them away,” says Arana, nodding toward the dimly lit craftsmen carrying on their pretense of masonry.
“Of course.”
Keslin enters the construction area and releases the workers for the day. They set about stowing away their tools in worn wooden tool bins, slopping out the wet mortar from their buckets and smoothing over the last courses they laid.
“Leave your things,” says Keslin, “you can get them tomorrow.”
A couple of them start to make protest, then decide better of it, and they form a line and shamble out of the keep. Keslin closes the door behind them, leaving the sentries to stand watch in the antechamber.
Renning leers at Arana as he prowls across the keep and reaches his hand down to young Phoebe. She takes it without contest. He lifts her up, her thin body feeling much heavier than the scant weight she must carry, and he brings her before Renning and displays her proudly.
“This is Phoebe,” he says. He settles on the floor and places the girl in his lap. She shies from the grotesque figure chained to the wall and buries her small face against her protector’s chest to block out the sight. Arana reaches around behind him and pulls from its sheath a long, serrated blade, which he brandishes fluently behind Phoebe’s back. “Now, Renning, I think you have a story to tell us… and I think you’d better tell it true.”
“Hurry up, I can’t hook him.” Lia crouches on a greenish boulder at the edge of the stream, postured like a little gargoyle, holding a knobby oak branch out over the water and watching the line weave back and forth across the surface. Fastened to the end of the line is a knotted coil of wriggling earthworms, and fastened to the worms is a speckled and fire-colored trout. They had used thread from the fraying hem of Jack’s linen shirt, tying it together for double-thickness, with a flimsy wooden barb as the hook. “He’s getting away.”
“Hold on.”
Jack kneels in a grassy patch on the bank and holds a long, straight branch down on the ground, slicing off curled peelings of young oak and honing the tip down to a fine point, whittling it into a makeshift spear. He drags the blade across the tapered end twice more and slips the knife under his belt, then takes the spear and bounds over to the stream where Lia sits, and he eyes the precarious catch over her shoulder.
He tiptoes over to a slanted boulder, and then another, working himself into the middle of the stream. He steadies himself over the trout and raises the spear up high, studying his aim, then thrusts it down into the water, giving it a good hard jab at the bottom, and then swashes it back out with the trout flailing upon its point.
“Got it.”
Lia springs off her boulder and lopes over beside him and watches with a morbid grin as he slides the fish off the pointed tip.
“I’ll get some more worms,” she says, and jumps back to the bank and falls to her hands and knees, crawling about and picking through the grass with her face close to the ground.
Jack steps back over and sets the fish on the ground, then draws out his knife and scrapes off its scales and slits it up the middle.
“I can’t find any… oh, here’s one.”
“Here,” says Jack, “let’s try this.”
He gives Lia a handful of guts and they walk on opposite sides of the crick and chum the shallow water.
“They’re gonna eat their friend?”
“I hope so.”
They bend down and wash the slime off of their hands, then Jack takes his spear and sets one foot on a flat rock and straddles the crick and waits. Lia forages till she comes up with more worms. She wraps the thread around them, winding them into a squirming ball, then ties it off and plunks it back into the water. She sits down on the opposite bank, stretching her legs out, and dances the bait idly through the water.
“We’ll see who they come to first,” she says pertly.
“It’s like when we used to go to the big river.”
“Yeah. That was so long ago…”
They grow quiet, reliving silent memories.
“I see one,” says Lia.
“Your side or mine?”
“Yours—he’s just under you. I see his little eyes.”
Jack looks down at a bit of chum swirling in the slow current, and from underneath the rock on which he stands a timid trout makes a quick play for it. He pistons the spear down and skewers him, setting off a cloud of muddy silt. He extracts the fish and tosses it on the bank.
“Think we’ll settle like that someplace again?” she asks.
“Someday, I guess.”
“You want to wander?”
“Kind of. I don’t know. I always wanted to see what’s out there.”
“I guess now we get to.”
“Yeah.”
“I like the water. It’s pretty out here.”
“It is. Never seen anything like it till we got to the Temple.”
“I wonder how far south it all goes.”
“The water?”
“The world,” she says simply. “Ethan’s map just ended at the bottom, like the lines wanted to keep going but there wasn’t any more room to draw them. That’s not all there is to the world.”
“No, course not. There’s lots more in the east, too, enough to spend thirty years walking around it.”
“Unless those old people led Kas and her friends around in circles for thirty years. I wouldn’t have followed those people anywhere.”
Jack laughs. “I don’t want to wander around that long. But maybe for a while.”
“Fish stole my worms.” She holds up her oak branch pole and the thin line has been picked clean. “I didn’t even see ‘em take it.”
“Have to be smarter than they are.”
She whips him with the wet line. “Hey, it worked the first time.”
They tarry around for a while longer and catch a couple more, then clean them upstream and set out on their way. The gentle sunshine and flattening landscape make their progress a bit more comfortable, but already the old blisters on their feet are starting to freshen up and sting again. As they walk, Lia carves off little squares of shiny white fish meat and they chew languidly and look around at the changing scenery.
As they press farther south, the signs of recent human activity become more abundant. They have strayed beyond the broad circumference of burned villages and slaughtered tribes and finally reached a land that is unsullied by the vengeful exploits of the Nezra. It feels a relief, to travel and not be chased, but they fear it will not last. From time to time they still peer over their shoulders, half expecting to see a new brigade rumbling toward them from the north.
The day passes its midpoint and far to the west a pale blue ghost moon descends into the calm ocean. Rocky outcroppings and narrow sandbars extend outward from the coast like gnarled fingers reaching for the deep. The remains of burned-out bonfires are scattered along the shoreline, with drifts of sand collected against them from the many days they’ve gone unused, evidence of wanderers who’ve come and gone with unknown purpose toward unknown destinations.
Jack and Lia look nervously about for any remaining inhabitants and they see no one. Despite the absence, the land feels far from lonely. Screeches and calls abound from the shadowy inland breaches, and every step they take causes the field grass to rustle with the furtive evacuations of small creatures fearing their approach, lizards and gray mice that scuttle about and halt suddenly at the sight of these two enormous giants trespassing on their homeland. The travelers look back as curiously as they are looked upon. It is a populated world they roam, prosperous with life, and they seem little more than mere creatures themselves in the midst of it all.
They walk with purpose through the living afternoon, traipsing through the rolling pastures and hiking past decayed barns and farmhouses, town squares, neighborhoods and the like, inspecting the subtle geometry that their concrete foundations have left behind on the flourishing ground, showing only the rough shape of the structures that once stood atop them, barely discernible rectangular formations poking through the underbrush as if they, too, are sprouting from the fertile earth in which they are planted. Jack and Lia peer at them as new age archeologists who’ve discovered an untrodden site ripe for study, imagining the exotic artifacts their excavations might turn up.
The mountains lay far to the east now, curved like an irregular crescent, and a sliver of smoke rises from one of the slopes in the distance.
“People?”
“Could be,” says Jack. “It’s not a very big fire, though. Must not be many.”
For a short span in the late afternoon the fire remains visible and their eyes keep darting back to it, wondering what kind of small band could be camped on the face of the foothill. They move past it, and as Lia fetches one last glance over her shoulder she sees that it has been extinguished. The last of the smoke rises and dissipates in the light blue sky.
“What if they saw us?”
Jack chews his lip. “We’re pretty far away… I don’t think they could.”
“We’re out in the open.”
“I know,” he says, troubled, and looks over his shoulder again.
They march over the top of a crooked gathering of hills and glide down the other side into broader, sweeping grasslands. They stop halfway through their descent to rest and survey the course ahead. Jack’s arm hangs loosely at his side with the long machete gripped in his hand, and its sharp blade grazes the tips of the grass stalks at his feet. Lia holds the whittled spear like a walking staff and she squints across the expanse before her. The land looks carpeted with green, glowing slightly golden in the evening sun, with clusters of cockeyed old trees scattered throughout, bursting with new foliage. A vigorous river spans across the low point, deep looking and wide.
A tremendous herd of deer steps daintily along the water’s edge, and they lower their small mouths to the running current and drink. Others mill around them, ranging from petite fawn clipping about on spindly legs to enormous bucks with multi-tined antlers and stern dispositions.
“Look at all of them.”
They settle down on their haunches and watch the spectacular parade pass by. A stout buck ambles upstream, and the rest take their time in catching up. A few of the deer sit in the grass with their legs tucked under them, looking around at the countryside as if on a picnic. Lia coos as the littlest ones frolic around the edges of the herd, running spry circles around some of the eldest.
Jack looks downstream and grips her elbow. “Look.”
“No,” she gasps.
A baleful mountain lion slinks out from a thicket of brush and creeps low along the ground toward the herd. An aging buck sees it first and spikes up his tail. The rest of the herd swivels their heads and for one fleeting instant every single one of them freezes in an exquisite tableau of shock.
The lion sprints.
The herd breaks for a narrow passage through the hills, stampeding in a mad frenzy and crying out in fear. The lion is a blur—he gains on them instantly and veers toward a terrified doe stuck near the end of the pack. She darts to the side and bounds ahead and the lion leaps on her, knocking into her shoulder and throwing her off balance. She manages a couple more strides before the weight and ferocity of the lion pull her to the ground. Her kin race away and do not look back. The lion hugs his foreleg around her neck like an old friend and sinks his fangs into the soft white fur of her throat and she goes limp in his embrace.
Jack and Lia sit petrified on the hillside and watch as the lion drags her away from the kill spot. He stops and looks around, then yawns widely, showing a vicious row of bloodstained teeth.
“They left her to die…”
“Mmm.”
“Why didn’t they kick him to death? There was so many of them.”
“It’s just not what they do. They run.”
Lia leans forwards and looks on somberly as the lion returns to the doe and clenches its jaw around the scruff of her neck and hauls her across the ground toward the patch of brush that he used as his concealment before the attack. He places her carefully under the thicket and uses his forepaws to scoop piles of dead leaves and twigs over her body.
“Is he burying her?”
“He’s hiding her. He’ll eat her later.”
Lia’s hand flies to the bandage on her left shoulder and she imagines the nape of her own neck caught in the vice-like jaws of the lion, being dragged off dispassionately and eviscerated with surgical precision, then covered away so that he can return later to eat a leg, and again the next day to devour an arm, and so forth until she is nothing but a little pile of bones. She shivers and hugs her arms tightly around herself.
“I’m glad you didn’t run away from me.”
“Never.”
They observe the lion’s unwholesome activities for a long span. Cool evening breeze is flowing toward them from the west by the time he finally finishes his work and leaves the vicinity.
“Let’s go.”
Jack peels off his sweat-soaked shirt and wraps it around the machete’s blade, then uses his belt to strap the little bundle to their spear. They hike down the rest of the hill, looking wildly around for the lion’s return, then scamper across the open field, past the bloodied ground, and when they get to the edge of the river they stop. Jack hands Lia the bundled spear.
“Hold on to this and I’ll swim us across.”
He wades into the slick current and Lia steps in after him. He gets behind her and braces an arm under her shoulder and pulls her into the deepening water, kicking out with his legs and stroking powerfully with his free arm. He angles upstream but the current still pulls them downstream as they progress. They flop down on the opposite bank and lay back, breathing heavily.
“They teach you that at the Temple?”
“Yeah,” says Jack, “it wasn’t all bad.”
“Least we had beds to sleep on.”
“We did have beds. And hot food. Wanna go back?”
Lia smirks at him and shakes her drenched hair, spritzing him with cold droplets.
Jack unties the bundle and wrings the river water out of his shirt, then fastens his belt and slips the machete through it. Lia takes the spear and uses it to heft herself back to her feet.
Across the water, the mountain lion has returned to his hunting ground. He prowls along the river’s edge and flickers his distrustful eyes their way.
“He’s back.”
“Let’s just go.”
“Will he follow us?”
“I don’t think so. Not across the river. If he does—”
“We fight him,” she says.
“Yes.”
They hike until the light is all but gone and only a thin amber glow silhouettes the spiky palm groves along the beach, and before long they happen upon the remains of a quaint little hillside town. They meander down a flowering avenue covered with delicate ferns and blossoming berry shrubs, their vibrant colors dulling and taking on the dark tannins of evening. They trudge past small ranges of toppled brick and cinderblock, webbed over with ivy, and make their way to a center point where several winding roads seem to converge. There is a modest structure there, with four walls but no roof. Jack and Lia climb an earthen ramp that was once a stairway and stand at the threshold of a doorway pulled off-kilter by the onslaught of gravity and peer inside.
A tangle of greenery has grown over a compost of old wood beams and machinery. A long marble counter stands in the middle of the large main room, next to a corroded wrought-iron gate. They look around by the dim light of the Milky Way, searching for a corner in which to sleep. Jack clears out some brush and finds the ground absent of animal burrows and snakes, at least for now, and he settles there with the strained sigh of a man much older than his fifteen years. Lia leans the spear against the threshold and joins him. They lie down in the corner and doze off quickly, the day having taken its toll.
Near the middle of the night, Jack’s eyes open. Some beast lumbers outside their shelter. Lia hears it too and flinches awake. Slow, crunching footfalls pass by the entrance in curious fits. It moves a pace or two, then pauses to sniff around with low, grunting inhalations. It moves on a bit more and repeats the process. Jack and Lia huddle together, their skin slickening with a sweaty film. It lurches heavily toward them and casts a sinister shadow on the cluttered interior shapes, hulking and long-jawed. Their pupils dilate with fear and they take thin, measured breaths. After a long excruciating wait, the footfalls round a bend and dwindle away.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know…”
“It sounded big.”
“I think it’s gone… listen…”
The only sounds now are familiar ones. They lie back down in their corner and settle in, and they find that sleep does not come so easily as it had before.
I’ll never make it, he thinks. Not like this. His travel is too slow, and his blood loss too fast.
Cirune lowers himself painfully from his exhausted steed and limps over to Balazir and hitches him to the nearest tree. He clutches his side and drags his lame leg back over to his own horse and belts it across its hindquarters and spurs it off into the night. Balazir is the quicker of the two and he’ll do well without the extra burden.
He sits down in the grass and removes the wrapping around his waist and inspects the damage. It is not the depth or severity of the wound that concerns him—the blade pierced mostly meat and fat. What worries him is how freely it has bled throughout the day. The steady undulation of the horse’s gait continually ripped open any scab or clotting that tried to form, and the wound reopened itself and poured more blood than he could stand to spare. He rode with one hand on the reins and with his other hand he pressed dirty rags against his side, hoping to stanch the flow and quell the drainage. If he can sleep for a few hours, it might seal itself and he can set out in the morning on a faster horse and maybe reach the Temple by day after next, with a few drops still left in his veins.
He hunts no food and builds no fire. He does not even pile nettles underneath him to make a softer mat. He simply closes his eyes and lets the delirium take him into blackness, uncertain as to whether or not he will ever wake up again.
When the night sky lightens to gray, the raccoons come home. They shamble up the earthen ramp, single file, like a little work crew returning from the mines. Two hollow-eyed adults touch their skinny snouts to the floor of the entrance and sniff around. They crane their necks and peer inside with worried faces—Someone has been here. Three little kits bound up the ramp and thump into them, then scamper past and run inside, cooing and rolling around on the debris, gnawing on sticks and slapping at worms on the ground. The adults let out a trilling chitter and the kits ignore them and cavort obliviously.
Lia sits bolt upright and watches the shapes move about in the gray dawn. “Wake up.”
“Hmm?” Jack raises his head and blinks around, trying to adjust his vision.
The two plump adults move onto the marble countertop and surmise the forms huddling in the corner. They leer at them peevishly with their black-ringed eyes. One of the kits holds a millipede in its little black fingers and chews it sloppily and stares at Jack.
Jack feels around for the machete.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m starving.”
“You’re going to kill them?”
“One of them.”
“You can’t!”
“I thought you were tired of eating bugs.”
“I am, but… they’re cute.”
Jack sighs and looks into her eyes, dark and glossy in the shadows. “All right,” he concedes, “but don’t blame me if you get hungry.”
She smiles coyly. Soft orange light filters through the haze and the morning brightens ever so slightly. Lia sits up and stretches her arms and a deep yawn overcomes her. The little family on the countertop watches her intently, and when her mouth opens wide and shows its teeth they lurch off the counter and scramble quickly away to their darkened, brushed-over hideout.
“Huh,” says Jack, “they looked at you and got scared away.”
She slumps her shoulders and rolls her eyes toward him. Jack smiles and grabs the long blade and stands beaming in the doorway, looking out at the sunrise.
“Bear,” he says. The massive tracks zigzag around their shelter.
“What.”
“Last night. It was a bear that went by. Big one.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
She takes her spear and jogs lithely down the ramp and turns in a slow circle to get a full view of their whereabouts. Whimsical old lodgings from time out of mind. Cobbled stone buildings that would have befitted a lord’s fiefdom in some other millennium. It lay on the crest of a smooth green hill, overlooking the misty purple valleys around it like a rotted fairy tale kingdom.
“Where are we?”
Jack ventures down the winding avenue a ways, toward a three-story villa covered with a ropy tangle of kudzu. Brown moss coats the old stone like velvet. He leans over a tall arched window and looks inside. It is cleared of rubbish and thick furs lay scattered about the clean-swept floor. More signs of humanity in the corner, piles of hides and wooden tools, kindling and firewood stacked against the opposite wall. Jack’s heart begins to pound.
Lia saunters up behind him and reads the courtly lettering chiseled in above what looks to be the entrance. “Olde… World… Inn… What does that mean?”
“I think there’s people living here. We have to go. Now.”
She snaps her head around instinctively and her knuckles go white around the spear shaft. The streets here are far from straight—they curve around haphazardly and make oddly angled intersections. Their sightlines are limited every way they look, shrouded by buildings and imposing oak trees that block the passages like weathered old gatekeepers. They see no one.
“Here,” says Jack, “this way.”
They stalk along the exterior of the Inn, stepping lightly, trying not to crunch the gravel beneath their boots and give away their presence. There is a sharp caw from the other side of the street and a flock of crows lights off from the leaning belfry of an old church. Jack jerks his head around and watches them flap away. Still no people, and he starts to wonder if he’s overreacting. Just as the thought crosses his mind, they see campfire smoke rise from behind a steep vaulted structure that stands directly ahead of them. They freeze at the corner of a three-way intersection and watch the smoke float skyward above the pointed roof, then motion catches their attention from the next corner down and they spot a few figures shambling across the street. A young man, barely older than Jack, carries a coyote carcass in his arms and an older heavy-set woman leads three goats along on leashes. Two rough-bearded men follow, each with long, stout bows over their shoulders. The woman laughs, and the men soon join her. Jack follows their motions until they disappear down the obscured side street. Friendly or not, he isn’t interested in lurking around their territory lest it bring about a test of their marksmanship. His machete would do little against them.
Lia spots an escape. “There—“
On the far side of the intersection, a narrow alley cuts off the main avenue and runs between a sturdy little tavern and a tilted framework with a few clapboard panels still clinging after all these years.
They find the right moment in each other’s eyes and bolt across the street together. They can see wisps of flame from the campfire through wreckage to their left, with many figures passing in and out of view. They look like simple people, the sort that Jack and Lia grew up with. They pause for the slightest of moments and watch them, each feeling a pang of desire to go be with them. To roast meat and laugh around a fire. To be with family, even if the family is someone else’s. A mongrel starts barking.
“Baron, shut up!”
The barking intensifies.
Jack and Lia skid around the corner, into the thin alley, and angle sideways between the shrubs and stunted trees that grow down the entire length. The mongrel must have been loosed because its baying draws closer.
“Baron, get back here!”
Jack and Lia reach the end and burst out onto another large, serpentine avenue. They hear the brush moving behind them and they hear the fevered panting, and they raise their weapons in anticipation, ready to strike at the snarling mongrel when it emerges.
Soon enough it does, and Jack looks quizzically upon it and does not strike. It is a dumpy gray thing with stubby legs and a short snout. Not the sort he’s used to encountering, but what it lacks in size it compensates for with zealotry. It barks at them so strenuously it risks convulsion, and they lower their guard.
“Shut up,” Lia hisses, and the creature rears back and growls from the very depths of its stunted bosom.
“Hey!” shouts a hardened old-timer. He draws his bow around and fumbles with an arrow. “Baron, get the hell away from ‘em.”
The old man clumps down the way, with his elbow drawn back and cocked at a high odd angle, ready to let go the arrow. He looks like he’s making a spectacle of the weapon more than anything, and the boy at his side watches his actions and mimics them with his own small bow.
Jack sneaks a look over his shoulder and sees them coming, albeit not very fast. He snatches the runt mongrel up by the scruff of his neck and the little body goes slack in his hand. He licks his black lips and whimpers, working his wide round eyes back and forth between them.
“Shhh.” Jack swats him on the rear. “Quiet.”
Baron lick his chops again, humiliated. He risks another feeble growl and Jack shushes him again.
“Get ready to run,” he says. He sidles closer to the edge of the brick wall and sees the old man hobbling toward him, then flings Baron out onto the avenue. He lands with his four paws splayed out on the ground and skids into a barrel roll, then jumps up and counters around in fitful circles, trying to gain his bearings.
Jack and Lia sprint down a long, straight thoroughfare that cuts down the hill and away from the strange old village. They are laughing by the time they reach the bottom.
“That was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Lia doubles over behind a boulder with her hand over her mouth. “I thought we were gonna die,” she giggles. “Ooh—are they following us?” Her smile drops and she spins around and squints up the hill.
The old man stands at the top of the rise.
“Stay way from here,” he shouts in no particular direction. “Better not a stole nothin’.”
A smile cracks on Lia’s face again and she plunks down on the ground. “What should we do?”
“Wait for him to go away, I guess.”
“Do you think they would’ve killed us?”
“Probably not, but… you never know.”
“I’ll bet they’re nice.”
“You always think that. Even if they were, they still might’ve shot at us. Sajiress did.”
“Mmm. True.”
“Are they gone?”
“There’s two of them talking now. They’re looking down the other way, though. Oh wait… there they go, I think they’re leaving.”
Jack pops up and looks after them. When they’re out of sight he takes Lia’s hand and ventures down through the rest of the town. The outlying areas are not of stone and the structures that once stood have moldered into the earth and given birth to sturdy new trees with roots that snake down over the mounds. Jack’s stomach gurgles and he wishes he had a fresh, warm raccoon slung over his shoulder. He settles for berries and grub worms.
Along the way, he fetches dark gray rocks off the ground and strikes them against the back edge of his machete, then pitches them away.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for flint.”
“What’s it look like?”
He seizes up a rock. “Kind of like this.” He strikes it against the metal. “But not.”
They carry on and keep a swift pace through the day, even as every step sends a sharp sting into their feet. Lia hands him rocks from time to time, and Jack keeps striking them until one finally sparks.
Their spirits lighten considerably as they drift southward, and as dusk sets in they make a little camp next to a burbling stream. Jack wades into the water with the spear and skewers some food while Lia strolls across the forest floor and snatches sticks and limbs for firewood.
They spark the tinder and the small fire takes hold. They use little tonged sticks to hold their fish out over the flames and they sit studiously and watch them cook.
Neither says a word until they’ve finished eating, the simple daily act has taken on sacred importance of late. When they’ve licked the tines of their sticks clean Jack casts them away from their camp, then digs out a couple divots with his machete and drives stout, upright limbs into the holes. He ties off a third limb across the top with stripped vinery and they lean leafy branches against it and make a little shelter and crawl inside. He lies on his back and Lia nestles close to his side, facing the fire. She narrows her eyes and stares deeply into the flames.
“So… what do you think it knows, this place? It can’t be just building things and growing food and all that. We knew most of that back home, enough of it to live anyway. There has to be… something else… but what?”
Jack is quick with an answer. “They know about the world, I think. How it burned and everything.”
“Is that why the King wants it?”
“I think so.”
“So he can destroy it?”
“So he can steal it for himself. He fears whatever they know, and he wants it because he’s afraid of it, because he wants to be the one who’s feared.”
“What if he gets there?”
“I just hope they’re stronger than he is. Much as he says he wants to keep the world from burning, I know pretty well he’s lying. So do you.”
The Temple stands atop a sea of fog like an enormous turret. Silent gray mist overlays the valley and ocean and seals itself against the bluffs, isolating them from the great wide world, and only the broad prominence of the grounds and the provincial hillsides are visible above it. At the edges of this ominous barrier stands a formation of warriors. They glower into the vast gray obscurity, their faces betraying a fear that perhaps some abomination may arise from it, as if the very fog itself might assemble, absent the ways of nature, into an army of wayward ghosts with swords of vapor and come marching across the plateau to do battle.
Their ranks have grown as the crews are called back from the quarry, and old men who’ve withdrawn from service don their warrior’s attire once more and arm themselves for the coming storm. They stand at all points of entry and exit, and they watch.
Halfway up the hillside, a creaky cottage door opens and Jeneth steps out onto the gravel path. Pairs of eyes surveil her movements steadily, from one station to the next. She holds her baby in her arms and walks with her head down—the warriors’ intrusive stares writhe and linger on her skin. She felt welcomer here years ago, when she was first carried into the Temple in her filthy wooden cage. So much has changed. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot. She slept not a wink during the night, and it wasn’t little Mariset that kept her awake.
Across her path walks William. Their eyes touch briefly and in his look he asks a question, subtle and unspoken, and Jeneth catches his intent and shakes her head somberly. No, her signal tells him, there is no news of Phoebe. William figured as much, and he shuffles off with the other boys toward the metalworks. Plots and schemes swirl in his mind.
An invisible wall of furnace heat washes over him as he enters. Hot cauldrons of molten ore bubble over fires that rarely stand unlit. By the dingy orange glow he pulls on his leather work gloves and joins the master workers by the cooling barrel. Already his head pounds in rhythm with the striking hammer and he looks dully around the dim shop. Wiry Creston carries an armful of unsharpened blades through the center aisle and outside to the depository where vast piles have accumulated—piles of tools, buckles, harnesses, arrowheads, and more swords and knives than could be counted with the simple maths they’ve been taught.
William reaches his leathered hand into the warm brine and fetches out more cooling blades and hands them off to another waiting apprentice.
“Thanks,” says Jorrie. Jorrie bears the prestige of being Temple born, though he is only half-kin to the Nezra. His mother is of the forest and his veins carry that defect alongside more noble blood. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“It’s okay, Jorrie.”
“Something bad is happening, isn’t it?”
William shakes his head and turns back to the water barrel.
“Come on, you know something… you always know something,” Jorrie presses. “What’s going on?”
“If I find out,” says William over his shoulder, “I’ll be sure to tell you.”
The striker sinks more glowing blades into the brine and William watches them darken and steam the water. He knows well enough what is happening, though he dare not breathe a word to anyone—it doesn’t take a spirited imagination to understand that these are the preparations for war.
There is commotion at the door and harried voices call every able-bodied man to the front. They take up arms and push through the smoky metalworks and emerge onto the misty grounds, then follow the general flow of rushing men and hustle off. More followers burst from cottage doors and the Temple’s grand entrance, coursing past the reflecting pool to the edge of the plateau. They stand shoulder to shoulder, their weapons drawn.
Taket heads the frontline of this tremendous swarm, his right arm raised high in the air, ready to give the call that will send the horde behind him storming down the escarpment toward whatever approaches.
The deathly moaning draws closer. Hooves crunch unevenly on the twisted path below.
“Hold,” shouts Taket.
The flaring nostrils of Balazir materialize from the murky swirl, and his powerful forelegs carry him toward the last rise and he becomes fully manifest, brown-speckled with broad, bellowing ribs. A sagging rider holds dearly to the crooked saddle. He grips the reins tightly with one hand, and the other dangles at his side like a ragdoll’s. Balazir hitches himself up onto the plateau and ambles forward a few paces and snorts toward the many faces that behold him, then shuffles back and settles himself.
Cirune falls to the ground.
His eyes loll back in his head. An entourage encircles him and lays him out flat and begins taking an inventory of his wounds. Through his rattled senses he feels the hands lain upon him, smoothing the sweat off his forehead and peeling back the hardened bandages on his leg and side. With the last of his feeble energy he thrusts his arm into the air, and in his tightly clenched fist is a crumpled scrap of thin hide.