by Glynn James
“The man of the tower shall fall, bringing the heathens down with him. The Earth will rise up and cast off the faithless, purifying it in flaming glory.”
Surely the book had been speaking of the coven’s leader? With Gaston’s unseen hand, Morlan had removed the primitive and faithless priest who had sat upon the throne. For a moment, Gaston had considered killing all the priests. But what would a prophet be without followers? The taint had taken the last refugees of the Elk, and so Gaston would tolerate the priesthood—for now. They seemed subservient enough. They were terrified of joining their brothers in death, he thought. Fear for their own lives was a good motivation.
He closed his eyes and turned more pages. When he opened them, his finger rested on another passage.
“The northern marauders will succumb to the hordes drawn into an alliance. The one who follows the wolf’s eyes will bring together the far-flung clans and lead them away from the stricken lands and into the new.”
Gaston stopped. He read it again, this time silently to himself. He trusted the words in the book. He had to. They had saved his life many times. For a moment, he considered ignoring the passage and flipping to another page in the book. Gaston coughed and looked over his shoulder. The doors remained closed and the room empty.
“The northern marauders.”
The interpretation could not be mistaken. The text left no ambiguity.
His people. They were the ones from the north, surely? But the book said they would be overcome. How had he not noticed the passage before?
And whom was this man who follows a wolf’s eyes? He knew of no such reference before. There were wolves in the forest, but to follow them? No. This made no sense.
Jonah. He shuddered. He could think of no reason for the leader of the Elk to be referred to as such, but somehow his heart told him otherwise.
A strange mix of anxiety and relief washed over Gaston. He felt the sweat underneath his arms, and at the same time, his stomach had settled. He had no spiritual alliance with Morlan, no long-standing allegiance to the Cygoa. In his eyes, Morlan and the coven were simply a means to an end. Of course, this would complicate matters. Morlan moved with an efficient deadliness that Jonah lacked. The Cygoa leader did not tolerate anything except absolute obedience, and Gaston appreciated that trait in the man.
He could not ignore the book’s words, but he did not have to share them with anyone else. If the book prophesized Morlan’s ultimate demise, then so be it. Gaston would plan accordingly. If the Cygoa leader knew what awaited his army, he could dispose of the coven—and Gaston.
Gaston slammed the book shut, leaving a cloud of dust floating in the air before him. He placed the book inside his robe and leaned his head back on the throne, closing his eyes. He thought of Roke and Seren, one dead and the other missing. Gaston knew the girl was resourceful, a survivor. It was likely she was still alive, and if that were the case, and Gaston could bring her to Jonah, he might still be of use to the leader of the Elk.
“Yes,” he said. “The girl. She helped me once before, and she can help me again.”
Morlan had called him into service. The priests had spent the evening preparing the coven for its journey to the front line. The Cygoa leader had asked Gaston to lead them there. What had seemed like a simple mission just a few hours ago now felt different. Gaston would deliver the coven as commanded, but what he delivered to Morlan had yet to be seen. For now, Gaston would keep his motives hidden and rely on the book, as he always had.
He could get comfortable in the stone tower, commanding the priests. Gaston was certain the scavengers in the ruins below could provide him what he needed. But the book commanded him otherwise.
Chapter 14
Jonah stood at the gate, leaning on the support post as he idly scratched his beard. Several dozen carts had already lined up nearby, along the scorched remains of the road that lead out of Rocky Mount, but that number wasn’t even a significant amount of what needed to be ready before they could leave. This was the thing he liked least about leading so many people. Back when it was just the Elk, and maybe even the few clans that joined him with Solomon, Gunney, and Declan, it was an hour’s work to pack the camp and move out. Now it took more like three. Over a thousand folk would now follow him from the mount. Over a thousand. It was unbelievable.
Another cart joined the back of the queue, but Jonah didn’t notice. His mind wandered back to the days when he had been a follower rather than a leader. He remembered a day when he sat on a cart, a boy too young to walk the great distance, his legs not yet strong enough.
“Over a hundred strong now,” he remembered Nera saying. “Next year, maybe a hundred and five, then more after that.”
His father stood at the edge of the forest village near the reservoir, waiting, as Jonah was this day, for the clan to line up their carts in readiness of leaving. “And still they take all day,” Judas had said. Jonah smiled at the memory.
“Too many old ones slowing us down,” said Nera. “Soon that will be us, probably.”
His father had laughed at that. Neither of the men had made it to a real old age. It was barely a year that they had been gone, but it seemed like ten.
This could be the last time we walk so far, Jonah thought as his mind drifted back to the present. Next year we can’t return to Eliz, but maybe there will be somewhere else, maybe even just as far as Rocky Mount, if it can ever be recovered. Or Raleigh. He didn’t like the thought of trying to establish some form of new Eliz in the ruins of Raleigh, but it may potentially come to that. The lands around the ruins of the ancient city were overgrown but mostly untouched, and although the chill weather still reached that area, it was not as lethal as the cold that hit the forest each year.
All these people will have to go somewhere come winter. They will need to meet up as we always have, but it can’t be Eliz now that the Valk have emerged. Eliz is a memory that must be forgotten, now.
It would be a difficult thing for many people, especially those who lived not far from the plains through the rest of the year. There were entire clans among this thousand people that had never been to the forests and had barely ever felt the chill of a winter wind.
And what of the other seasons? Were all of these people planning to go to Wytheville? With the Valk overrunning the east, they may have no other choice. It would mean many more clans in the forest. Some of them had spent most of their lives along the great sea coast, fishing in the salt waters. They may never see the sea again.
He sighed and watched as a dozen more carts rolled along the road from the camp toward the queue. I have never seen the sea, he thought, and now I likely never will.
The familiar figure of Ghafir approached, walking with a confidence that Jonah saw in few people; it was almost a swagger.
“How goes it today, oh great leader?” Ghafir said as he reached the gate. Jonah noticed that he had a new quiver, and both his old one and the new were stuffed full of arrows.
“Good, but slow,” said Jonah, ignoring the obvious jibe in his friend’s tone. “How long does it take to take a tent down and shove it on top of a cart?”
Ghafir smiled. “Some are not used to the ways of your kin, my friend.”
“I did notice,” Jonah said.
“Some of these clans, like my own, are used to an almost permanent camp on the plains,” Ghafir said.
“How did you withstand the summer?” Jonah asked. “Surely the heat was too much?”
Ghafir nodded. “It was. And we would move farther south and west, almost west as far as this, but not in these lands. Farther south, before the lands turn to taint, was our other camp, and that was also permanently placed. But then we had to go there. When Judas banished us from the lands and took our name, we were not welcome in many places. The south is where a lot of the grey clans go. It is not a healthy place. Of course, no one would bother to take the land from us there. It was only when we came to Eliz each year that we would have to play for the best spots on the plains.
Our camp—where we stayed this year—was far enough from the city that few would contest it. Such is the way of grey clans.”
“I suppose it’s not much different to what we do,” said Jonah. “Or did. Go from one place to the other each year. Though, I will admit, your options seem like they were less favorable than ours.”
“Indeed,” said Ghafir. “But you have freed us from that, and I do not hold you responsible for your father’s actions—or my own, for causing Judas’s wrath in the first place. They were both of the T’Yun, and disagreements between the subclans of that time were different. Their ways were different.”
“Hmm. I wonder how different,” said Jonah. “It seems we have the same enemies, even after generations.”
“That I cannot argue with,” said Ghafir. “And we seem to have gained extra ones along the way.”
They stood in silence for a while, watching more carts join the line. Finally, Ghafir spoke.
“Do you think the Valk will continue west?”
Jonah shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m hoping the removal of the bridge, and the breach itself, will stop them. They live underground, but we’ve no way to know just how far their tunnels reach. The breach at least should have slowed them in expanding this way.”
“Let us hope so,” said Ghafir. “For I fear them far more than any Cygoa. We have proven we can fight the Cygoa. Look at what happened to the Nikkt in just a week of fighting the Valk.”
Jonah nodded. “Speaking of Nikkt, I see Donast coming. That should be the last of the clans. I suppose it’s time to move out.”
Ghafir laughed. “More walking. Walk, walk, walk. It’s a wonder the Elk have not gained hooves.”
Chapter 15
Rav followed the tunnel, paying close attention to the height and width of the space. Sections appeared to have been bored with an almost impossible precision, while other stretches forced him to his hands and knees, where he crawled through the gaps like a sewer rat. He had not come across any intersections in the subterranean space, and he had yet to see a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel.
He had no way of knowing whether the sun was up or if the skies were dark. Rav stopped when he got tired and closed his eyes, awakening to the same total darkness. At some point, on what he believed to be his second day beneath the surface, he stumbled into the edge of a huge steel door.
A thin gray line stood between the two doors, and as Rav approached, he knew there had to have been a light source inside. Rav paused, putting his ear to the door. The metal felt rough with rust and gave off a bitter smell. He used both hands, running his fingers across the rivets that remained on the surface. The doors had to be ancient, and at one time they must have protected something important.
Rav counted to two hundred. During the count, he heard nothing but a low whistle of moldy, dank air passing through the tunnel. If the Valk ahead of him had stopped behind those doors, he probably would have heard them, and he definitely would have smelled them.
The door on the right swung inward with a ragged grinding sound. The hinges protested but gave way. Rav looked up to see thin lines several hundred feet in the air. At first, he thought he was staring into the night sky of a bizarre and alien world—a place where stars dashed instead of twinkled. But as his eyes adjusted, he realized that the thin lines of light hanging above his head were fissures in an artificial ceiling. He now stood in a massive underground space, one that had been built hundreds of years ago and for reasons he would never comprehend.
Although the ambient light penetrated the ceiling of the underground structure, it was not enough for him to maneuver through the space safely. A single misstep, a twisted ankle, or a hidden tangle of rusted wire could trap him and lead to fatal consequences. Rav dropped to his knees and used his hands to scour the ground at his feet. He found copper wire and hunks of wood. He used the wire to band the wood together and then ripped a strip of cloth from his clothing. But then Rav realized he had no embers, no striking stone, no way of lighting the torch he had made.
“Fuck me.”
He forced himself to sit down and wait for what felt like an hour. In that time his vision improved, and he thought that the afternoon blossomed on the surface because the light coming through the lines in the ceiling had intensified. Now, he could see 50 to 60 yards into the depths of the underground cavern. Shapes materialized from the darkness, and Rav decided it was safe enough to explore the ones closest to him.
He climbed over stacks of broken wood until he stood before three gigantic faces staring back at him. He knew they had to have been machines of some kind, and yet their metal grimaces made him shiver. Each of the three faces had two eyes spread far apart on its face with a long dark rectangle where a forehead should be. In between the eyes sat a single row of perfectly vertical teeth.
As he approached the closest of the three, Rav realized that the face was the front of a massive cart not unlike the ones he had used to guard the pass. These metal cars stood twice as high as those and twice as wide. And when he stepped to the side, he saw a door with steps leading up to the cabin. He looked down and to the right and saw rusted steel wheels that had not moved for centuries. The people of the old world had used the small carts to move several people at a time. This significantly larger cart appeared to be able to move dozens at once.
Rav grabbed a steel railing and climbed the steps into the head of the beast. The inside of the car smelled vaguely of piss and rotten meat. After the Dustfall, people had lived inside of this thing—he could tell. As his eyes continued to adjust to the low light, he began to notice more detail. At one time, seats extended back through the cart, two on each side of the aisle. But the people who had crawled down from the surface to live in these old carts had stripped the seats. It appeared as though they had left in an unanticipated hurry.
He walked down the aisle from the front toward the rear. On his right, Rav saw something he had never seen before—a rusted steel basket sat atop four wheels. Old plastic jugs had been set inside, now covered in cobwebs. He kept going, spotting a large black rectangle of glass sitting on the floor of the cart. In the middle of the black glass, a crack had spider-webbed outward toward the edges. A single black wire ran from the back of the rectangle to a head with three silver teeth sticking out of it.
Rav bent down and put his hands on the surface of the black rectangle. Few windows had survived from ancient times, and most of the structures that Rav had explored had nothing but gaping holes where windows once stood. But this object was different. It appeared to be a window without a frame, and it was completely freestanding. What would those people have expected to see when they looked at this thing? And why was a wire connected to the window? He shook his head, adding the questions to the thousands of others he had gathered over his lifetime about the people before the Dustfall.
He continued to the back of the cart, where a door opened into the front of a connected car. Rav stepped out of one and into the next, and he saw what remained of bedding. Animals had torn open and eaten most of it. He looked around and observed that sleeping there would provide some level of security. If someone stood guard at each end of the car, it would be impossible to ambush the people sleeping inside.
His foot bumped into something, and he bent down to take a look. It was another object with a strange black wire coming out of the bottom. It had what he presumed was a handle and a long shaft at the end. When he looked closer, he noticed a screwdriver tip on the end. His men had found many tools from the old world inside the carts they stacked at the pass; the screwdriver was the most common. But he had never seen one fashioned this way, and that black cord made him pause and question what purpose it could serve.
Rav yawned and looked back over his shoulder at the bedding. It had been chewed up and was dry-rotted, but it beat sleeping on the cold, wet rock of the tunnel floor. He walked over and lay down on one, casting out a cloud of dust mites in the hazy light that found its way inside. The space felt protected from the su
bterranean winds, a protective enclosure like the safety of a cocoon.
It did not matter what the ancients had done with this space. It had served a purpose for the people who came after. Why they left would be a mystery, but as far as he could tell, many of them had lived here. Despite the continual darkness, there still seemed a lot was left to scavenge.
He would allow himself the luxury of uninterrupted sleep. Rav would close his eyes and rest without fear, and when he awoke, he would continue his exploration of this underground world. He could be comfortable here—safe. And if the clans had perished, and he was unable to find a way to the surface, he would have no problem living out the rest of his days alone, exploring the mysteries of the distant past.
Chapter 16