Chapter Sixteen
The first shine of morning light sees three separate bands embark upon three separate paths that each lead to the same destination, distant and solitary in the desert expanse. Keslin turns his army on a new course, old Thomas spurs his bartered pony, and in the quiet valley outpost, Nyla saddles their mounts and lays out the provisions for a long ride east. There are dozens of horses milling around, each with loaded saddlebags draped over their haunches and small kits hooked over the pommels. Nyla closes the gate then arches her back and stretches, looking out over the morning tide with a reflective air, as if she’s already feeling its absence.
Out back of the shelters, Jack and Lia struggle to pull their boots up over their pant legs. The salve on their feet squishes between their toes and soaks the wrappings around their blisters. Their muscles have tightened such that they can barely move, and they stumble around clumsily, grinning at each other. Lia slips a blouse over her head and gets lost in the pleats and folds.
“Um… Jack…”
“Hmm?”
“I’m stuck.”
He straightens her out and lowers the collar around her head. The loose neckline slips off the curve of her shoulder and he rights it, smoothing it delicately over her bandages.
“I told you we’d be okay.”
“You did.” She slips her arm through his and looks up at him. “But we’re not there yet.”
Nyla put them up for the night in her living room and they awoke to find the cabin empty. They limp out into the courtyard, catching the eye of a few early risers. A young woman steps out onto a small wooden porch behind one of the cabins and calls over to them.
“Breakfast is hot if you’re hungry.”
As soon as she speaks the words, Jack realizes that he is ravenous. They wander over and climb onto the porch. The smell of food cooking makes his knees weak.
“So you’re the two,” says a thin old fellow, resting back by the fire with his feet kicked up on a wooden ottoman. Three teary-eyed children sit dolefully on the floor at his feet.
“Good morning,” says Jack.
“Would be if I weren’t leaving. What’s all this about an army? Where you two from?”
“Drink your coffee, Keith. Leave them alone. Nyla told you everything last night.” The woman hands Jack and Lia plates heaped with eggs and biscuits. “Sorry, he’s a little…”
“Don’t be,” says Lia.
“I’m June.”
“I’m—“
“—I know who you are. You knew Renning?”
“Not exactly,” says Jack with his mouth full. “We met Ethan.”
“You saw them killed?”
“We didn’t see it, no. I think Ethan figured they would be, though.”
June stumbles back against the counter.
“You knew him?” asks Lia.
“I’m his wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
She sweeps a tear out of her eye with her thumb. “These are our kids. This is Renning’s dad, Keith. He’s not… he doesn’t understand. His mind…” She taps her head.
“Oh,” says Jack. “I understand.”
“You came all the way here to warn us?”
Jack nods.
She takes them both by the hand and squeezes. “Thank you.” Another tear breaks free. “Excuse me,” she says, and cups her hand over her mouth and leaves through a side hall.
Keith eyes them from the fire, looking them over suspiciously. “You done something to my boy?”
“No, not us, we…” Jack stammers and scratches his head. “We didn’t do anything.”
Keith levels his gaze and the children at his feet watch Jack and Lia hypnotically. They chew uncomfortably under the scrutiny, and both are quite thankful when a few more settlers straggle in and start filling their plates.
“Get some sleep?” asks Denit.
“A little.”
“That’s about what I got.”
He pours out cups of black, bitter coffee and Jack and Lia make sour faces when they taste it. June shuffles back in, her face puffy, and scoops up two of her children and nods for the third to follow her along. They disappear into the back room, collecting their things.
“We’re about to set out,” says Denit. “Nyla’s getting your horses ready. We’ll be riding out with you.” He nods to the men, a little over a dozen now, milling around the kitchen and back porch. “I guess we got no choice but to trust you—you seem pretty sure of yourselves.”
“We are,” says Lia.
“How strong are they—this army?”
“Very strong.”
“They took your folks?”
Lia nods tightly.
“I’m sorry for you. It’s awful.”
Nyla shouts out a call from the fenced pasture and everyone quickens their pace with breakfast, shoving the last scraps into their mouths and hustling out the front door.
“Saddle up,” she yells. “If you’re riding with me, we’re leaving.”
Jack and Lia hurry over to meet her, looking like the rest of the settlers with their new apparel. Jack wears a jacket of well-milled cloth, crisp seams at the shoulders, a familiar cut. The only relics they carry of their former selves are the pendant around Lia’s neck and the long blade that Jack filched from the dead Halis, the machete forged at the Nezran metalworks.
“How you feeling?” asks Nyla.
“Sore.”
“Feel sick or dizzy?”
“No.”
“Come on over here, meet your ride.” She leads them to a dark mahogany horse with his head dipped in a bucket of grain. “Here, Jack, he’ll be good with you. Lia, yours is saddled right there. Take a just minute to get ready—we need to hurry up and get everyone out of here.”
“Where are they all going?” asks Lia.
“We’ve got a little hideout up in the hills. They’re going to try to make it there by sundown.”
Denit drifts over and kisses her on the cheek.
“All set?” he asks.
“Think so.” She darts her head around. “Are we forgetting anything?”
“We’re cleared out.”
“Then let’s get going.”
Flocks of settlers gather around the pasture carrying sacks full of their belongings. They load up a few horses with food and supplies, then line up their sorrowful caravan and begin their evacuation. Nyla and Denit jog over and pull their son close, hugging him tightly. When the round of anxious farewells is concluded, the fellow travelers trudge back to the pasture as their families set out on foot for the mountain hideaway. The remaining few, two dozen in all, enter the gate and slip stoically onto their saddles and ride in nervous circles, waiting for Nyla’s lead. She clips over on her black horse, a finely whittled bow angled across her back, and leads them through a narrow cleft that cuts away from the valley, leaving their oceanside haven behind.
They ride along the southern edge of the wetlands, passing an abundance of demolished cities and towns. Row after row of grassed over avenues, each looking the same as the last. The rising sun beats down and everywhere the palm trees sway with the breeze, making the vast decomposing basin look like some kind of forgotten paradise.
“I thought we were pretty well hidden,” says Nyla. “I guess you can never get too far away.”
“How long have you lived there?”
“Since I was about your age. This was always my favorite place growing up. My grandfather founded it, oh, seventy years ago, I think. He fell in love with the ocean.”
“I don’t blame him,” says Lia.
“Where did you grow up? Before… you know…”
“Out in the middle of a great big forest.”
“What was it like?”
“Simple,” Jack says warmly.
They follow a weaving concourse that snakes through the mountains ringed around the basin, and the signs of the old urban sprawl grow scarce. Their horses strain against the incline, driving higher and higher up the old pass. Jack rides next to Lia. They turn sideways on their saddles and look down into the basin, into the staggering enormity of it, trying to comprehend how they crossed it all on foot. The rank wetlands swelter in the sun, a muddle of concrete and vines and filthy water.
Their small caravan crests over a dry mountain road of hard dirt, cacti, and sagebrush. The desert lay below, flat and desolate, blurry through a veil of heat waves. They ride slow down the eastern slope then kick into a brisk trot when they reach the flatlands. The air dries out and the temperature rises considerably. Jack works his jacket off and they tie cloth bandanas around their heads and squint against the reflected sun.
“How far is your father’s house?” asks Jack.
Nyla surmises the horizon, as if the answer lay out there somewhere. “We’re looking at a three day ride or so. Usually takes me four, but if we push it…”
“Is that where Thomas grew up?”
“It is. I lived there when I was young, too.”
“What’s it like?”
“It’s lovely. It’s lonely. It’s no place to raise a family. Not anymore.”
“Is that why you left?” asks Lia.
“I never really left,” she says. “I’ll always go back.”
“But what is it?” asks Jack. “Why is it so important?”
Nyla gives him a subtle nod and quickens her horse, riding ahead of the pack. Jack and Lia follow suit and keep pace, putting distance between themselves and the others.
“Not everyone here knows what we keep. I’m not sure how much my father wants them to know. I’m not sure how much he’ll want you to know. But I will say this—his work has saved a lot of lives. Countless. This isn’t the only outpost—there are others.”
“Started by your father?”
“And his father, and his father before him, and so on.”
“What about Ethan and Renning?”
“They were emissaries. They sought people in need.”
“We met Renning’s wife.”
“How is she taking it?”
“Bad.”
“I would too. He was a good man.”
“And Ethan? What was he like?”
“He was like family to me.” Nyla’s delicate face turns stony. “He was one of my father’s favorites. When they were younger him and Ethan used to ride out together, looking for new colonies or the means to start one. They set up new trade lines, strengthened the old ones.”
“Trade lines?”
“Mmm. Say you’ve got livestock, lots of sheep to make wool, but you don’t have much corn or wheat. Maybe there’s another settlement with corn, but needing wool to make clothes. They’d put one in touch with the other so they both got what they needed.”
“How come they never found us?” asks Jack.
“It looks like they did.”
“Before, though—our home in the forest. Did they ever look in the big forest?”
“They might have, a long time ago. How long did your people live there?”
“For a hundred years or more.”
“Nobody ever came into the forest except us,” says Lia. “That’s what made it so nice. At least until the Temple found us.”
They carry on, asking an endless barrage of questions, and the answers lead only to more questions. The monotony wears on them, riding with flummoxed minds and tired joints, and their mouths grow too dry to speak. Gusts of wind blow grit and hot air in their faces and they turn their focus solely toward the dusty trail ahead.
By late afternoon, they no longer see the scoured footprints of old cities in the sand. Signs that there was ever a civilization here at all have vanished entirely and the land looks much as it has for many thousands of years and longer—a vast ocean of sand reflecting the blue sky in silvertone.
The men from the outpost grow fidgety and restless as the day comes full circle, and in the varicolored dusk Nyla canters off to the side, peach light spread across her chalky face.
“Let’s stop here,” she says, and dismounts.
They unpack the horses and water them, then situate themselves on thin blankets spread out over the sun-warmed ground. Inquisitive hoots trill across the endless desert arena, accompanied by the brazen yipping of coyotes. They eat a few small bites and drink sparingly then lie down to sleep under the crisp, clear sky.
Jack lays his head on his pack and watches the landscape eclipse into darkness, thinking about where they go from here, if they ever stop running. His mind buzzes with thoughts of outposts and colonies, trade lines and uncharted territories. Lia stirs in her sleep and he watches the delicate curve of her eyelids, her eyes underneath flickering to and fro, deep in slumber, and he wonders what dreamworld she is lost within.
They advance throughout the entirety of the next two days and still do not arrive. Through the long, listless hours they learn the life story of every man along for the ride, and tell their own in turn. They set camp for a third night and Nyla tells them they are close.
Come morning, the horses are testy and worn-down. The weary band mounts up and pushes ahead, feeling dry and brittle and hungry.
At midday, in the deepest heat, they see a dark speck on the far off horizon, surrounded by stars of light like glittering gemstones—a river. Jack licks his cracked lips and stares at it, drawing closer with every hoof strike.
The thin tributary meanders through the sand, watering a small refuge of greenery that looks alien and misplaced in the desert wasteland. There are no temples, no golden spires, no graven monuments—only a few groves of palm trees and a couple of rickety wooden sheds. Situated in their midst is a large two-story house. A shaded porch wraps around the frontage, with a stone walkway leading up to several curved steps. When the riders draw near, kicking up dust, a weathered old man rises from his rocking chair and steps to the front of the porch and raises his hand in a high salute.
“I can’t stand to think of it,” says Ezbeth.
“It’s not all that bad.” Calyn lowers herself into a chair by the kitchen nook. “We feed them well. Sometimes I sneak them a little extra.” She gives a crafty wink. “Least they don’t have to work.”
“They’re locked up like animals, Calyn.”
“Well… I think that’s a bit harsh. And it’s only for a time. Till things get back to normal.”
Ezbeth leans back and wrings her hands. “I’m not sure I want things to go back to normal. I’m not sure what I want anymore.”
“You’re worried about your boy, that’s what’s got you.” Calyn takes her hand across the table. “Listen, he’s going to be just fine. He’s a good soldier.”
Ezbeth withdraws her hand and pinches her fingers to the bridge of her nose. “They’re my life, those children. I love them like my own.”
“So do we all.”
“Do you? Would you like to see yours locked up down there?”
“That’s a bit different, I think. My children were born here—” Calyn pushes her chair back and trundles off to the pantry. “I’ve got something I think’ll help,” she calls gaily, opening up the cupboard and pillaging through it. She draws out a rounded carafe and whirls around the island, grabs two mugs, and returns to the table. “Supposed to use this for cooking.” She winks and pours them each a full glass of violet-colored wine. “To better days…”
“To better days.” Ezbeth drinks in a daze and pushes the mug away.
“Just know that the King and his people are doing everything they can to keep us safe.”
Ezbeth chortles. “I think the power has gone to our young master’s head.”
“Nonsense. He’s an even kinder sort than his father.”
“He is nothing like his father. His father was a decent man, not a child killer.”
“Ezbeth!”
“He never would have allowed this.”
Calyn peers around at the scullery girls working away in the prep room, then leans in close to Ezbeth and whispers.
“I know you had your time with him—as have many women, I might remind you—but don’t forget how many died because of his weakness. Don’t forget that. Young Arana understands. He is guided. He is a special man. And whatever he says is the right way… is the right way. It’s just that simple.”
A look of concern touches Hargrove’s face as he watches his daughter’s horse slow to a trot and click up the walkway, followed by half of the men from the outpost. He scans the boy and girl riding near the back of the line with an eye not accustomed to welcoming strangers, then steps down off the porch and walks to meet them in the front yard.
“What is all this?” he drawls.
“Dad… ” She drops down and throws her arms around him. “Something terrible has happened.”
“Nyla, what?”
“A cult. They got Renning and Ethan. They burn settlements and kill everyone but the children. These two got away.”
Hargrove’s face goes slack as he looks at the boy and girl, their ill-fitted clothing covering dusty bandages, their skin a mosaic of cuts and bruises. They peer down soberly from atop their horses.
“You run?”
They nod.
“How did you find us?”
“Ethan gave us a map,” says Jack, “but they stole it.”
“Who’s they?”
“Nezra soldiers…”
Hargrove looks to the others, expecting to see some flicker of disbelief in their faces, but they peer back earnestly as if they know it to be true—and the boy, for his age, speaks with tremendous conviction.
“Dad… they’re coming. They know how to find us.”
Hargrove takes in a deep breath and turns off toward the horizon as if contemplating the fairness of the day.
“Come on around back.”
They follow him along the side of the house and hitch their horses to the clothesline posts and porch beams. A couple of the men start toward a small gabled shed looking for pails. Jack climbs down and helps Lia to the ground and they stagger around on wobbly legs. A small vegetable garden lay behind the house, with carefully tilled rows sprouting tiny green stalks. Wire fencing extends from the rear of the shed, boxing in a dozen squawking foul. The backyard slopes down to the thin river that feeds the little oasis, and the two men carry their pails toward it to fetch water for the trough.
Jack looks around dizzily—it’s pleasant enough, but he wonders why anyone would kill for this place.
Nyla walks her father over and he extends his hand to Jack.
“Ryan Hargrove,” he says. He turns and takes Lia’s hand and gives it a quick shake. “Come inside. Tell me everything.”
He leads them through the kitchen door at the far end of the back porch. A low counter runs along one wall, and in the center is a slanted wooden table with a gouged and worn surface. Hargrove moves to a rounded fireplace that adjoins the surrounding rooms and lights a small fire under the black kettle that hangs from a swinging arm. Nyla ushers them into the front room and shows them where to lay their things.
“It’s empty out here,” says Lia. “Don’t you have any neighbors?”
“Not anymore. The river’s been drying up. Some years it barely flows. There used to be a lot more here.”
The front room extends forward, bordered on two sides by the long, covered porch. Slatted shutters are folded back and a warm breeze flows through the broad windows. An ill-matched assortment of chairs and tables are stationed about the room, layered with stacks of crinkled parchment. Jack shucks off his jacket and unfastens the blade he’s kept at his side throughout.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” says Nyla, stowing his things on a cluttered shelf by the enormous window. “We’ll have food in a bit.”
She shuffles back into the kitchen to help her father. Jack and Lia fidget in the front room, not sure whether to feel welcome or not. The house is cluttered from floor to ceiling with trinkets and boxes of old knick-knacks, stacks of writings, antique furniture, everything coated in fine layers of desert dust.
“Something’s not right,” says Lia. “This isn’t the place from those legends.”
“Huh-uh,” says Jack, looking cock-eyed at the piles of disarray.
Through an open door he spies a smaller side room, full of equipment and strange machinery. He peeks in and nods for Lia to join him.
“What is that?” she whispers, clenching onto his shirt sleeve.
Standing in the corner is a large mechanism of gears and springs, taller than them, faced with a dial numbering one through twelve. It clicks when it turns. They slip across the hardwood floor and watch the gears tick round slowly, an eerie mechanical heartbeat.
“Some kind of machine.”
“What does it do?”
Jack shakes his head.
A workbench lines the opposite wall, with awls and files and skinny metal tools laid out next to an assortment of foreign gadgets. He walks toward it and knocks his head into some apparatus hung from the ceiling by wires. He steps back, rubbing his forehead, and at first he takes it to be a taxidermied bird, but with closer inspection he see that it, too, is a machine of some sort. Silver wings extending from a sleekly crafted barrel, with fins like a fish fanning out from the tail-end. It jerks and sways on its wire mount and he reaches up to steady it.
“I know what this is,” he says, Lia clinging to his back, looking up.
He reaches for it again, magnetized, and Hargrove calls them back into the kitchen.
“I suppose you’re hungry.” Four bowls are arranged around the table, steaming with soup. “Not much, but it’ll hold us till dinner.”
“Listen,” says Nyla, taking her seat, “there’s something else you should know… They met Thomas.”
Hargrove sits back and narrows his eyes skeptically. “My Thomas?”
“Only he’s not called Thomas anymore,” says Lia, coming round the corner. “He told me to say hello. And that he loves you.”
“Where… ?”
“He lives in the woods with a bear and a wolf. He told us about Arana Nezra the First.”
“A bear and a wolf…?”
“They’re his only friends. He doesn’t trust himself around people anymore.”
“What?” Hargrove slumps and stares down into his soup, confused. “He ran away forty-odd years ago… It’s not possible. I thought he was dead… or so far gone we’d never hear of him again. Nyla, are you sure it’s him?”
“It sounds like him. It sounds like the man you told stories about.”
“How? How did this happen?”
“We met him in the valley by the swamp.”
“Wait,” says Hargrove. “Start at the beginning. Where are you from?”
“The forest.” Jack looks to Nyla, and she nods for him to proceed. “We got stolen by these people, the Nezra people, and they took us to what’s called a Temple.”
“Temple?” asks Hargrove. “Where is this Temple? Can you show me on a map?”
“I think so.”
Hargrove screeches his chair back and bustles into the cluttered side room, digging through various piles until he produces a folded map. He lays it out flat on the kitchen table and Jack and Lia huddle over it. It is broader and more expansive than the one lost to Cirune, showing the whole of the great landmass upon which they are situated, not just the western shoulder. Notes and little numbered dots are scribbled haphazardly across the natural features. A crooked line is drawn through the center of the continent, and there is only one note written east of that line—
Unknown Fate
“Right there.” Jack points to an outcropping of land along the central coast.
“Monterey,” says Hargrove.
“That’s what it’s called?”
“That’s what it used to be called.”
Lia reads the tightly scripted letters—Monterey Bay. She scans over the map and her eye catches on more fine lettering. “Big Sur… Jack, look!”
His eyes mist over as he looks at the faded tree symbols demarcating the forest. “That’s where our home was…”
“In the redwood forest?” Hargrove runs a hand across his head and smoothes down his wiry salt-and-pepper hair. “What happened to you there?”
“They came at night—the Nezra—they burned it all down. They…” His throat closes. Looking at that little sketched forest brings it all flooding back. Lia reaches for his hand under the table and squeezes. “They killed everyone… they killed my mother… her parents. They took all the children back here, to the Temple.”
“There’s a man there,” says Lia. “Arana Nezra the Second. Have you ever heard of a king before?”
“I’ve heard of lots of kings,” says Hargrove, “although I doubt very much that he is one. Go on… tell me about him.”
“They say he has spirit eyes. That he was sent from the Beyond.”
Hargrove’s face darkens.
“He has blue eyes. His father told everyone he was special. A gift.”
“Who’s his father?”
“Old Arana,” says Jack. “He’s dead. He knew your brother.”
“He told them about the old days,” says Lia. “They called him prophet.”
Hargrove looks at her. “Prophet?”
“He taught things they never knew. He taught old Arana how to build the Temple.”
“Oh… ” He gulps in a breath, as if he’s about to speak, and then he rises from the table. “Let me show you something.”
They follow past the fireplace into the side room. Hargrove sets to rummaging through the piles and boxes again, casting aside scrolls and thick books. He extracts a heavy tome from the bottom of a stack, papers slipping off onto the floor, and he thunks it down atop his workbench.
”Here,” he says, opening the leather-bound journal and thumbing through the pages. “Does your Temple look anything like these?”
Various sketches grace the pages, drawn with a skilled hand. One shows a towering cathedral with winged buttresses branching outward. Another shows olden castles with tall gates and watchtowers. Hargrove turns the page. A city built along a mountaintop, with trapezoidal monuments lining its course. On the opposite page, a grouping of pyramids on a flat expanse, three of different sizes.
“It looks like all of them,” says Jack. “What is this?”
“My brother’s journal.”
Below the drawings they see his name signed in cursive—Thomas Hargrove. He flips to the back of the journal and his face softens. He turns the picture toward Jack and Lia. Two boys, their arms over each other’s shoulders, with ornery grins on their faces and close-cropped hair bristling on top of their heads.
“We were seventeen when he drew this. Shortly before he went away.”
“He left this behind?”
“He left everything behind. Carried nothing. And he left this Temple, too? You said he lives in the woods?”
“He lives all over. I think he felt bad for what happened.”
“Oh no,” says Hargrove, steeling himself, “what did he do?”
“It wasn’t him,” says Lia. “It was wanderers. They came and burned their houses down. Thomas said it changed them. Made them start killing people.”
“I see.” Hargrove looks in deep thought. He cracks his old knuckles. “How did you come upon Ethan and Renning? Were they at the Temple?”
“They caught Renning spying on them. It was the night we ran away. Ethan was hiding from them. We found him, but his leg was broke, he couldn’t walk. He gave us his map and asked us to come find you. He saved our lives. He let them catch him so we could get away. He wrote on the map—Ethan and Renning are dead.”
“Ethan. He didn’t want us to go looking for them.” He plunks down on a wooden stool and stares out through the window. “They were spying?”
“Mmmhmm,” says Lia. “Spying on the Temple.”
“They’re not supposed to approach groups that look dangerous.”
“These people don’t look dangerous. Not from far away.”
“You have to know them,” says Jack. “Arana says the world is his.”
“The King?” asks Hargrove.
“Yeah. The King. Everyone who doesn’t follow their ways… he gets rid of them.”
“He’s done this before? What he did to your settlement?”
“He’s done it for years. All through the forest and coast. Says they’re calling on dark spirits.”
Hargrove settles his weary old bones and looks at Nyla. “It’s a genocide.”
Jack nods, though he has no idea of the word’s meaning.
“And you?” he continues, looking at Jack and Lia in awe. “You’ve come all this way? Just to warn us of this?”
Lia nods.
“Ethan said you’d give us answers,” says Jack.
“He did, did he? Answers to what?”
“What happened to everything?”
“That’s not an easy question.”
“Wherefrom came the cycle?” asks Lia, with a familiar cadence that makes Hargrove flinch. “Do you know?”
“The cycle?”
She describes for him the equation that Thomas had drawn around the campfire. Hargrove allows himself a nostalgic smile, thinking of his long-gone brother.
“You won’t find answers to those things, young lady. I’m sorry if you were told otherwise.” The smell of spiced chicken cooking on the grill floats in from the backyard fire pit. Hargrove breathes it in. “Smells like dinner’s about ready. Nyla, would you run out back and check on them?”
“What do you want, Dad?”
“Drumsticks,” he says, smiling. He thrusts his hands in his pockets and studies them seriously. “So… you want answers?”
They nod keenly.
“Well… you’ve made a long journey to be here. You’ve risked your lives. I suppose you’re entitled to some answers.” He turns and ambles back toward the kitchen. “Help me move this table. Not used to this much company.”
Jack and Lia carry the table down a narrow hallway, and Hargrove clears off a smaller table and joins them together in the center of the front room. He arranges a variety of chairs and stools around it, then lays out pieces of silverware.
“We’ll have a little something to eat,” he says, “and then we’ll go.”
“Go?”
“To Alexandria.”
Thomas looks a ludicrous sight riding his pony through the desert, like a windswept vagabond clown lost in the elements. He rides in his britches with a threadbare shirt wrapped around his shaggy, long-whiskered head. The old pony looks tuckered to the brink of collapse. He spurs it on mindlessly, fearing for both of their lives.
The first two days of his travels were quite lonesome. For the last day and a half he has watched the cloud of dust over his shoulder, drawing nearer each time he looks. An army. He wonders if any of his old friends are along for the ride.
“Hold on, boy.”
He slides down off the saddle and takes stock of his whereabouts, searching for familiar landmarks. In his delirium, the rocks and far-off mesas appear to shape-shift, the ground under his feet seems liquid. He sways and tastes the wind. He reaches into his saddlebag and takes out his flask, fumbling the last few drops of water into the tired pony’s mouth. The pony coughs grit from its lungs.
Thomas faces the trail he’s just ridden. His tracks are fading under the pixilation of sand. Away back in the distance, a pale tornado of hoof dust rises above the flatness, gaining on him. He hooks his foot into the stirrup and flies backwards, landing on his ass with his foot still caught up. He groans and slaps at his head to clear it. Slowly, he stands and pulls himself awkwardly onto the saddle and touches his heels back. The pony, loath to move, trudges forward.
“Just a little further, old boy. Stay with me.”
The fluxing desert morphs into a vision of his childhood. He is twelve years old and his father and mother are guiding he and Ryan along the river in back of their house, riding up to see the big lake. He never lived a day more perfect. He sees the adventurous grin on his brother’s face just before he spurs his horse and tears off. He hears his father’s voice, yelling for him to slow down. He hears himself laughing as Ryan gallops away, and he laughs all over again from the thought of it, dry and ragged—a lunatic display in the empty desert.
The illusion disperses and he snaps back into the moment. His lips are so parched they’ve sealed themselves shut and he works his tongue around to pry them open. He slicks the sweat out of his eyes and settles back for the ride, delivering to the pony a soliloquy meant to inspire the troops of England at Agincourt.
Hargrove starts to rise and Nyla places a hand on his shoulder and takes up his empty plate.
“Sit down, I got it.”
A wry smirk tinges his face and he stays put. Nyla and the others carry the dishes into the kitchen and make quick work of cleaning up the front room. The desert glows with shades of red and orange through the tall open windows and the breeze running through has finally cooled. Hargrove leans back and picks at his teeth, thinking on their predicament. Nyla and the men are whispering about it in the kitchen. He notes the worried faces of his two young visitors, then rises and shuffles down the hall.
“Nyla, sweetie… why don’t you tell everybody to head out back. We’ll be around before long.”
“You need anything?”
“We’re fine. You want to join us?”
“Sure,” she says, wringing her hands on a wash cloth. “Give me a minute.”
“Tell Denit he’s welcome.” He dawdles around in the kitchen, hunting through the drawers for something sweet.
In the front room, Jack shoots Lia a nervous glance. They collect their meager belongings and shuffle toward the mudroom that leads to the front door, leaving behind the clanking of dishes and hushed discourses trickling through from the kitchen. Talk of armies and fighting. Scared talk.
Jack opens the door and guides Lia through with his arm around her. They step to the curved edge of the porch and gaze off at the tedious landscape.
“What are we gonna do when they get here? These people barely have weapons…”
Lia shakes her head. “I don’t know, Jack. Maybe we’ll run.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s no place to run. We can’t make it out in this desert by ourselves.”
“Nyla said they have a hideout somewhere.”
“I’m tired of hiding.”
“So am I,” she says, though she means a different sort of hiding.
They stand on the porch and watch the fiery sphere in the west sink perceptively toward the dry sand on the horizon. One by one, shimmering stars peek through the darkness in its wake. The front door whines open and Hargrove cocks his head toward them curiously.
“Where you headed?”
“I thought you said you were taking us.”
“I am. But it’s not out there.” He waves them inside and disappears through the mudroom.
Jack holds Lia a minute longer, wishing for some easy way out of this mess, and feeling a despairing lack of solutions. They turn and move back inside, where Hargrove has rearranged all the furniture in the front room, shoving everything back along the walls. He stacks chairs in the corner and motions for Jack to help him lift the table. When the center of the floor is clear, Hargrove reaches down and peels up the corner of a matted old rug and pitches it aside.
Concealed beneath is a large square door with a rope handle. He lifts it back and lets it swing over and fall to the floor. A blast of dust swirls around the room.
“Careful,” he says, and lowers himself down a wooden ladder to an underground platform.
“You go,” says Lia, pushing Jack softly.
He peers down into the pitch-black cellar, then places his foot on the first rung and descends. Lia climbs down more slowly, her knee still aching, and Jack steadies her on the last couple steps. In the darkness, they hear metal grinding on metal and a thin ring of murky light opens along the floor.
“Give me a hand here, Jack.”
Together, they pull back the rusted circular hatch. Cool air drifts past his face and Jack fights a quick spell of vertigo as he looks down the vertical shaft, boring deep into the earth. The duct is lit with strange patches of murky white light. He searches for the source but sees no lanterns or torches—only dimly lit metal rungs receding downward for a great long ways. Hargrove lowers himself over the lip and starts clacking down the rungs.
Lia looks over the edge queasily and Jack peers up at her.
“Can you make it?”
“Catch me if I fall?”
He smiles and disappears through the portal. After a long descent they reach a wider, circular platform. Hargrove moves past it and continues on down the spiraling stairs. The light is coming from thin, milky panels set into the walls. Only a few of them still glow. Jack reaches up and touches one.
“You coming?” calls Hargrove.
They curve down the stairs and arrive just as he is turning a metal wheel and opening an upright hatch on the middle landing. The spiral stairs continue further down, seemingly forever.
“Did you build this?” Lia asks in astonishment.
“No,” laughs Hargrove. “I can barely keep it running.”
He steps through the hatch door. Flickering white light throws spectral illumination across the crescent-shaped room. It is dingy looking, with skeins of dried rust water crisscrossing the metal walls. Hargrove ushers them to a round window on the far side.
“Touch it,” he says.
Jack reaches out and places his hand on the glass, cold to the touch. It feels so good after the desert heat that he presses his face against it. Through the glass, he sees tall black columns arranged in formation, several stories high, blinking with scatterings of pinpoint light.
“What does this machine do?”
“It remembers.”
Lia steps forward and gazes down into the shaft, coursing her eye along the sleek black pillars.
“What does it remember?”
“Everything. From thousands of years back, all the way up until twenty-two thirty-seven. It’s all here. Everything we’ve ever known about the world and about ourselves is written inside of here. We keep these things. That’s our purpose.”
Nyla's footsteps wind down the stairs and she ducks through the portal.
“Hi. Denit decided to stay up top.”
Lia fixes on a framed portrait fastened above the window, showing a handsome young man with slicked back hair, peculiar clothes, and a mysterious smile. Etched on the frame is the name Ryan Hargrove.
“That doesn’t look like you,” she says.
“He would be my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather,” says Hargrove, counting out the greats with his thumb and fingertips. “He built this. Over two hundred and seventy years ago. Just before the collapse.”
They stand simply, looking up at the picture.
“Why?” asks Lia.
“He was a philanthropist.”
“What’s a filanothrist?”
“A powerful person who wants to do something good. He built this as a lifeline, after it became clear that the last days were near. Named for the city in old Egypt—the library. It’s a preservation effort. Built to last a thousand years. By the looks, it won’t last half that. Time gets everything, I guess.”
“So there’s writing in there?”
“There is. But not writing the way you and I are used to. It’s coded. Runs off electricity.”
Jack furrows his brow.
“I’ve heard of that,” says Lia. “It’s lightning.”
“Well, sort of. It has its own power source, but it’s failing. To fix it, I’d have to work with matter on the tiniest scales. I’ll stick with gardening.” Hargrove grins. “I fear we may be the last generation of keepers who truly understands what it is we’re keeping.”
Jack traces his fingers over the cold glass, a solemn look on his face. “I don’t understand.”
Hargrove flicks his eyes toward Nyla. “You want to know what happened to the world, Jack? Lia? Would you like to see what the collapse of a civilization looks like? Are those the answers you're looking for? Because I can show you…”
Jack turns to Lia. She nods meekly.
“Yes.”
“Come on, we’ve got to get something from below.”
They step back over the metal lip of the portal and descend more steps, the light turning darker as they travel lower. A chill in the air runs clean through to their bones and they start shivering. Lia rubs her thumb against Jack’s palm as they descend, round and round, lower and lower. A strange noise emanates from the depths, more felt than heard. Everything seems to be steadily vibrating. A solitary plink of water breaks the monotony of the hum.
Nyla bears down on another metal wheel, stuck in place with rust. Jack goes to help her and they jerk their body weight against it to dislodge the mechanism. It screeches slowly until the hatch pops free.
They enter a small dark chamber, sulking in dim red light. Another clear wall stands before them. Nyla feels her way along the corner to a near-empty shelf and reaches for a stack of zippered pouches.
“No,” says Hargrove, “it’s not needed. Nothing to contaminate anymore.”
He steps to the clear enclosure and produces a square key, which he inserts into a slot, and the first of two doors cracks open automatically. He proceeds to the next, and when it opens, a wave of air gushes out under pressure. By the thin red glow, Jack sees row after row of shelves stretching back into the darkness. They are empty, save for one. A solitary black case rests alone on the barren shelves and Hargrove takes it carefully into his hands.
“This is our last,” he says.
They leave the clear composite doors wide open and trudge up the tight spiral, back to the crescent chamber on the middle landing. Hargrove lays the black case on the floor. Beads of moisture form on its cool surface. He pulls a tab along the corner and peels a line from around its edges, unfastening the case, then folds it open and removes a clear panel with wires dangling off the sides. He carries it over to a small console, where a similar panel is already installed, and takes a few moments to switch them out, setting the old rigging off to the side and connecting the new in its place.
“Hope it works.”
“Here,” says Nyla, fetching two chairs, “have a seat.”
She feels along the edge of the console and lifts a thin black lid, exposing a jumble of buttons and controls. Hargrove positions himself before it, dancing his fingers over the console as if trying to remember the routine. Tentatively, he clicks a series of buttons and the screen flickers with blue light.
“Ah. There. Pull up your chairs, let’s see if I can get this going.”
He enters more commands and the blue light becomes an image—a glorious city. Jack’s heart pounds as he looks on it. Tall glass towers, just as he’s been told.
“These are some of the last transmissions,” says Hargrove.
The image begins to move. The glorious city vaporizes in a fantastic ball of flame and the screen turns bright white. Changing patterns of light strobe across their drawn faces as they watch the horrors progress—a tiny apocalypse reflected in their eyes. More cities, felled by shockwaves of inferno. Violent hordes consumed with flame, their faces shriveling like burnt paper. Bodies so shrunken with hunger they look like ambulant skeletons. Armies of steel machines. Lia’s color drains from her trembling face. Jack is expressionless, void of emotion. A sudden wave of nausea rolls over him. Thomas was right—they never should have looked. Every image is worse than the last. There is no sense to it. Nothing to be gained. Every step they took through the cities of old, through those empty decaying streets, every step was a trespass on hallowed ground. All his fantasies about the old days seem so childish now.
“Make it stop,” he says.
Hargrove taps his console and the screen flickers to blue. He looks at them and says nothing. For a long moment they stare at the field of blue light, letting the slaughterous imagery fade from their retinas.
Nyla steps forward and places her hand on Lia’s trembling shoulder.
Lia breathes heavily and looks up to her. “Monsters…”
“It’s a lot to take in. I wish I could offer more in the way of answers,” says Hargrove. “I gave up trying to figure it out a long time ago. Decided there were better things to worry about.”
“How do you know it won’t happen again?” Jack asks numbly.
“It may well. History is full of savagery. No reason to think that’s the end of it.”
Jack rubs his knuckles in his eyes until a mosaic of expanding squares eclipses his vision.
“It’s not all bad,” says Nyla. “There are good things, too. Would you like to see?”
“What kinds of things?”
Hargrove touches the console and a crackling sound issues from the corner of the room.
“Bah,” he says.
He stands and bangs his fist against a perforated vent and beautiful music pours through it—a multitude of instruments never heard before in their lives, full of magnificent sound.
“This was written seven hundred years ago by a deaf man.”
He calls forth more images and the screen once again animates with a pageantry of brilliance. Hargrove begins in the early days and proceeds through the millennia with a quickness that bewilders his young audience, still of the forest at heart. They watch civilizations rise. They watch them fall. Yet through it all, and despite the failures and losses accrued through the centuries, what they see is a great ascension, a quest lasting thousands of years with no end point. The ache of destruction becomes a wistful thing next to the majesty of creation. These are the people Jack has dreamt of, in bright crisp attire, carrying on through streets of wonder with casual aplomb. They see the great works in their former pristine grandeur, before the scourge of Time wore them brittle and picked their bones clean. The whirlwind of visions comes to rest on a vast, barren red desert. Jack and Lia sit breathlessly on the edge of their seats, knowing at once that it is not the earth they see before them. An insectoid contraption with metal legs and a shiny exoskeleton settles itself on the surface of that red wasteland and two figures emerge wearing suits of silver, their heads encased by translucent globes. They bound airily across the alien vista, and they plant in the hard-packed redness the flag of a forgotten people.
The screen flashes to blue. The only sound is the steady thrum of subterranean machinery.
Hargrove rests his hands on his stout belly. He is beaming.
“A hundred years,” he says, “from the days of horse and buggy until the Age of great cities. We could lift ourselves out of this mess in a hundred years time. We have the force of knowledge behind us. We don’t have to wait centuries for new ways to be devised. We know the way. It’s all so simple, really.”
“How?” asks Jack. “Everything is gone. It’s all gone.”
“Oh, they had certain advantages that we don’t have. But the opposite is also true—we have a blueprint that they did not. Yes, their population was stronger. They had more established trade routes. Resources were plenty. We’ll have to power our work differently, but it can be done. Oh yes, Jack, it can be done.”
Hargrove smiles so brightly he seems at once more youthful than his two boggle-eyed visitors.
“A hundred years…” says Lia.
“A hundred years. When your grandchildren are as old as I, this world could be a very different place indeed. I’ve dreamt it my whole life. We have everything we need right here.”
“But your machine is breaking.”
“Let it break. Come on upstairs. I have something else to show you.”
He starts up and out of the crescent chamber and Jack snatches one last look at the sparkling pillars beyond the glass, barely able to comprehend the sheer volume of work contained therein. They climb to the upper landing and Hargrove opens the hatch he had bypassed earlier and they step inside. Black composite trunks are stacked floor to ceiling like coffins in a catacomb.
“Everything we need is here.”
He unlatches one of the trunks and creaks it open, revealing a silverwhite rectangular plate, so shiny it looks wet to the touch. With slow reverence he reaches inside and raises the plate, handling it as delicately as he might hold a butterfly.
“Platinum.”
Jack and Lia step close enough that their breath fogs its surface. It is engraved with minute writings on front and back, full of odd symbols that call back the dirt-written equation that Thomas had drawn by firelight.
“This tells of the movements of astral bodies, thousands of years worth of studies.” He hands it to Lia then lifts out another. “Here is the chemistry. Below that, more physics. More of the sciences in here. In this one lay the humanities,” he says, swatting the side of a high-stacked trunk. “Here, the engineering. And over here, more philosophy. It’s a scant collection, but it’s enough. The rough basics. You could build quite a society with the knowledge contained in these trunks.”
“Why do you keep them locked down here?” asks Lia. “Why don’t you share them?”
“We do. I have a small printing press. We run copies of the vitals, the things people need to live. The settlements we work with know we have something. But the full extent of it we keep hidden. It would be disastrous if it fell into the wrong hands. Such as this supposed King you speak of.”
“So Ethan and Renning…”
“Were spreading the word. Field work. We’ve done it for generations, since the downfall. For a long time not much happened. The die-off in the aftermath was terrible. Most people weren’t killed by war but by nature. Preventable deaths. Some of them we reached, most we did not. And records have been kept so that these last two hundred and seventy years aren’t lost to history. I’ve scrolls and ledgers from the earliest keepers here, the ones who lived down in this shaft until the poisons cleared from the air. Some are from the man I’m named after.”
“The man in the picture.”
“Exactly. Little by little, people came out of their hiding places and started to live again. Hasn’t been easy, though.”
A thought occurs to Jack. His own ancestors were there, surviving the terrors he and Lia have just beheld. They must have been, he thinks, or I wouldn’t be here. The notion sends a shiver down his spine, imagining some long-gone relatives of his, citizens of the tall glass cities, perhaps bearing some of the same familial traits as he, fighting their way through the horrific downfall. He thinks of the voice that rang in his head when he was locked in the pit, urging him forward, and imagines that they must have heard it too.
“Hargrove!” Denit’s voice echoes down the shaft.
“Yeah?”
Denit shouts more words, garbled and incomprehensible. Hargrove sighs and sets the plate carefully in the black trunk.
“Time to get back up, anyway. Let’s see what he wants.”
He stows everything as it had been and they climb back through the narrow shaft, rung over rung, until they reach the cellar. Nyla stays behind to seal the hatch and the others go up the wooden ladder to the front room. Jack is last out—when he surfaces, he sees Denit and Hargrove leaving by the front door.
“What happened?” he asks Lia.
She shakes her head, then takes his hand and leads him outside. The men from the outpost line the edge of the porch, staring off at the horizon. Hargrove shuffles up and joins them. At first it appears they are looking at nothing, just the dark empty desert, but as they step closer the fires becomes visible, burning like a votive memorial on the far-off horizon.
“It’s them,” says Lia, tightening on Jack’s hand. “Where are we gonna run?”
He wishes he had a response.
Hargrove turns around, scratching his head, and addresses the gathering.
“Here’s your King’s army, now,” he says derisively. “I guess we’re leaving a little earlier than I thought—they’re not twenty miles off yet.”
Nyla steps out onto the porch and startles when she sees the fear in everyone’s eyes.
“Dad… what’s going on?”
“We’re leaving. Now. We’ll head north,” he says, turning his thumb toward the men. “You’ll ride south, down to Marikez. The plates are going with you. Tell Marikez to send everyone who’s able and willing to fight. We’ll chart his route.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the Temple," he says. "To kill the King.”