Simon peered around the sheet. Three ribbons of light passed through the holes and across the central floor to another sheet with veins of reddish minerals running along the stone. There, three brilliant spots appeared, brightening and shifting as the sun crept higher, two of them luminous white and one glowing scarlet.
Simon stared, dazzled by the small, beautiful lights on the rock. The parts dropped into place in his mind: the twin pillars, with the sliver of light between them, the panel of holes, and the final colored screen. If things were not arranged just as they were, the sunlight wouldn't shine into a pattern -- certainly not this pattern. If the sun didn't rise just where it did, a different part of the twisting twin pillars would be illuminated, light would fall through different holes, making different colored spots on that last screen of rock. Maybe four spots, maybe two, or five. Two red, none red...
It was a calendar.
The two white spots and one red -- that was today's date. Tomorrow the sun would rise at a slightly different azimuth, as it journeyed solstice to solstice, which meant different holes, different colors.
Nothing like it existed in Algolus or anywhere else in the world. The engineering of rock out of cave sinter was one thing, but the coordination of the stones, the design of the patterns of holes... if vivets had built this, they were more advanced than anyone had thought. But why would they need it? What would they use it for?
The luminous spots faded and vanished. The sun was lost in the clouds. Simon stood and watched the bare, cold sheet of rock where the points of light had been.
Bogg stepped from behind a column. "Morning, pup."
#
Chapter 26
"Bogg! Are you all right?"
"Plumb wore through. No sleep."
"Me neither."
"I spent the night in a staring contest with a green man, down the way there. Then another one came in and chittered at him, and they both left. The other one had a necklace in its hands. Your'n, I judge. I was unwatched and felt turned loose, so I wandered. These stones go on for a bit. It's all bigger than it looks."
"I talked with one. The vivet killed in that clearing was someone close to her."
"What the jings are these critters up to? And did you say 'her'?"
Simon closed his eyes and thought of poor Ee. "She's in mourning. That's what it is."
Bogg spat into the dandelions. "So why don't they mount up and run those bastards into the ground?"
"I don't know. Maybe losing the one was enough for them. Maybe seeing the swordsman fight gave them pause. Maybe vengeance isn't their way."
"That's their shortcoming, then. Suits me well enough. I'm going."
"Really?"
"I don't see any greenies trying to stop me."
Simon shook his head. "No sleep, no food. The trail is so old -- you really think we can catch them?"
Bogg barked out a laugh. "No, pup! I'm going. Not you. You stay with your little green friends if you want."
"Bogg--"
"And I mean it this time. If you try to come, I won't just ignore you. I'll whale you silly and leave you for dead. I swear it."
Simon had no will to fight Bogg on the matter. He slumped against a stalagmite. His head hung low and fatigue pulled at him. "If I'm that useless to you... if I hinder you that much... then yes. I'll stay here."
Bogg scowled and snarled out a frustrated sound. "It ain't your uselessness so much. You ain't as useless as when I first met you, though you are a boulder to carry at times… but that's beside the point. The thing is, well... I'm a bit of a bastard. That is, I ain't fit to look after a pup such as you. Not such as you should be looked after. I ain't fit to look after anybody, tell truth. Heck, I reckon my best friend in all the world is a trapper named Aloysius, with a beard down to his belly, and I last seen him in the Darkling Hills well on six years ago. I just ain't set for people. I don't want them. I won't have them."
Dull aching rage swelled in Simon's stomach, cramping in his fatigued, sleep-deprived body. "All right, Bogg. Go."
"I'm sorry, Simon-lad."
"Just go."
Bogg's blue eyes searched Simon's for a moment, then turned grim. Bogg jutted out his chin and drew his black cloak about him. "Take care, pup." He disappeared beyond the flowing columns.
Simon seethed. By staying behind, he was abandoning the quest to avenge his father. Simon had no lust for vengeance in his heart -- no need to kill -- but all the same, the thought of letting the swordsman and his allies escape -- after all the crimes they had committed -- sickened him.
Simon thought of Bogg gaining on them in long strides, and let the image cheer him up. Maybe they wouldn't escape after all.
Part of him wanted to find his way back to Fort Sanctuary, but he condemned this as merely the instinctive pull of the familiar. There was no reason to go back there. But maybe he could hike eost, down to one of the villages along the coast.
What could he do? Where could he go? Could he even find his way out of this maze of rock? He sat down, exhausted and hungry, against a column.
His remaining strength left him and his body pressed painfully against the rock. He felt powerless, as weak as the day he had failed to save his father's life. After all that had happened, he hadn't changed at all.
The gray sky sent brief bouts of snow, which melted flake-by-flake on the stone or vanished into the dying coals with barely a whisper. After an hour, the stalagmites were wet with snowmelt. The clouds broke, and shining beams slanted from growing patches of blue.
He couldn't lie here forever. It was time to pick a direction and start walking.
Ee reappeared, quiet as the falling snow, with food and fuel for the fire. In this light, the oval leaves of her dress were brilliant green, and her skin shone as verdantly as a sapling newly open to the sun. Her braids were coal black and swayed as she placed branches just so on the coals. She wore Ahm's necklace around her neck.
He wondered if Ahm was her brother or her husband. He didn't know how to ask for words like that. He had never seen a vivet child -- did they have brothers and husbands, sisters and wives? Maybe vivets grew on trees, and those words were meaningless. Mothers, fathers, daughters, sons...
She passed him boiled venison and berries, and ate quietly with him. Simon was glad vivet diet was not as strange as other things about them. She ate daintily, which didn't surprise him, and she showed no signs of exhaustion, despite staying up with him last night.
"How long can I stay here?" he asked. Her little chin stopped the rolling movement it made when she chewed. She couldn't have understood him, and she made no answer. Simon regretted asking.
Her chin started again. She swallowed, and he could see the muscles in her throat move.
"Never mind. I won't stay. I just wish I could understand more about Ahm."
Her eyes focused on him, cold and lightning-blue. She had caught that last word, he knew.
"Sloros Ahm." She set down the berry she had held in her fingers and her delicate arms hung limp, a weeping willow.
Simon looked askance at her to show he understood. Sloros... a word from his dream, and so ominous. It meant killing vivets or humans, he thought, or maybe it meant murder, rather than manack, which could mean killing an animal or cutting down a tree.
Ahm is murdered.
Ee roused herself to her feet. She waved a hand over the remaining food and said, "Kenok nata."
"You're leaving?"
Her little feet carried her to the edge of the circle.
"Don't go!"
She was gone.
Simon was too exhausted to chase her. The sun shone through a gap in the clouds, and a pillar to the aust of the circle, with a tapering point, cast a shadow on the floor. Faded round stains, some milky, some scarlet, made arcing dotted lines across the stone. It was a sundial, too, and the red and white traces reminded him of the sunlight on the wall at sunrise. P
art of the language of the ancients. Or perhaps he was so tired he was seeing spots.
He had been awake almost thirty hours, and couldn't do any more. He stretched out, piled his pack under his head, and fell asleep.
#
Chapter 27
Simon felt better. He was jogging through the Green Man Forest, eost of the Darkling Hills, in the cool of a summer morning. Birds chirped in the lowest branches of the pines and firs, and he could hear them, out of sight, high in the occasional redwoods that stood like wooden monuments taller than he could see.
The wild man was beside him.
The giant's long strides came slowly, so Simon could keep up by maintaining a light trot. The man's hand -- at Simon's eye level -- swung like a slow clock's pendulum.
"Tlal! Bolalbi nana hem sako," Simon said. ("Hey! I didn't know if I would ever see you again.")
The wild man stopped. Those legs stood before him like two hairy auburn trees. Seven feet over Simon's head, the wild man's pleasant dark face and orange eyes gazed down at him.
"Ifiga Simon," Simon said.
Ifiga--
The giant turned and crouched low as if startled by a sound, his eyes scanning the distance, where the trees mottled into brown and green impenetrability.
Then Simon heard it too. The barking of dogs.
"Pada?" Simon asked. ("What is it?")
Crouched, the wild man was only a head taller than Simon. He brushed a hand big as an oar blade over his eye and listened. Then, with an explosive snort, the giant stood and ran.
Too fast! He was out of sight before Simon could react. For a moment Simon heard the receding soft crunch of his feet on leaves and pine needles and the baying of a dozen hounds closing in -- but there was nothing to see. Simon sprinted after him.
The giant's tracks lay ten or twelve feet apart. Then the ground became rocky and they vanished altogether. The dogs grew louder. Hunting dogs! What if Simon climbed a tree? The wild man was too big -- he'd just pull branches down -- but Simon could manage.
No, that was madness. Chasing prey up a tree merely cornered it. That was how hunting worked.
Not in these redwoods, though. Simon wondered if the wild man might leap fifty feet to the lowest branches of a redwood, then climb a hundred feet higher than that. Maybe he already had.
Think! Who was hunting here? If only Simon could--
"Hey!" Simon screamed. "Call off your dogs! Hey!" He couldn't believe his ears. He'd just heard himself cry, "Tlal! Nadu ta wrenkoroo! Tlal!"
Those dogs wouldn't attack a person, would they? Or would they rip him apart? Simon glanced up the redwoods as he ran, wondering if the wild man was up there. Couldn't the giant reach down and scoop him up to safety?
The trees thinned out and Simon dashed up a rise of granite outcroppings. He stopped fast, boots skidding, at the twenty foot drop-off. Beyond, meadow grass and stubby pine saplings waved breezily around blackened tree stumps. A natural clearing, the site of an old forest fire.
The giant bound through the clearing, straight for Simon. He had never climbed a tree. He had run this way, seen the hunters waiting at the clearing's far side, and turned around.
It was an ambush.
Beyond the giant were eight men on horseback. Thirty vivets stood with them, wearing iron collars linked together with sagging chains. Each vivet struggled under a heavy pack. In the center of them all prowled a she-bear fitted with a saddle and bridle. A man, with brown hair streaked with silver that turned in the wind like aspen leaves, sat proudly astride the bear.
He stood in the saddle. His face bore a scar from the center of his forehead, under a black eyepatch on his right eye, to the front of his right ear. His chain mail glistened in the sun as he leveled a firelock with four black barrels at the giant. As the giant reached the bottom of the rise where Simon watched, the firelock cracked thunder and spat four puffs of smoke.
The giant's broad chest exploded and blood splashed on the rocks. The wild man stumbled and teetered, finally crashing onto the granite under Simon like a felled tree.
The men on horseback cheered in Algolan accents.
"Excellent shot, Governor!"
"Congratulations, my Lord."
"Fitting, fitting, that you should be the first to defeat such a vexing creature."
"Indeed, after so many others had found nothing but tracks all these years."
"What a giant! I've never seen anything so fearsome in all your lands, my Lord."
Smoke curled from the firelock barrels. The man dug his heels into the bear's flanks. She growled and lumbered to the wild man's corpse.
Simon ducked and peeked over the top of the rise.
The long-haired man with the eyepatch holstered the weapon on the saddle, dismounted, and considered the giant from head to toe, nodding proudly. He turned to his entourage, placed a boot on the creature's hairy rump, and with a casual hand drew a broadsword from a sheath on his back.
The man pointed the sword to the sky. "My friends! Another victory!"
The crowd applauded.
Sunlight sparkled on the runes along the blade's deep groove. Simon struggled to make them out--
KALLISTI.
Low snarling came from behind. Simon turned, and the hounds were on him.
#
Chapter 28
When Simon awoke, the scream was already half out of his body. He gasped and sobbed.
Sunrise touched the stone circle in the dripstone monument. Rays beamed through the network of holes and made two white and two red spots. They were already fading when Simon's groggy eyes focused on them. He could barely see them, the images in his mind were so powerful.
The wild man.
The wild man had shown Simon his death. And the death of Mira.
So the swordsman wouldn't scurry back to Algolus. The swordsman had more ambitious plans, or would someday come to have more ambitious plans. Spearheading bloodthirsty Algolan rule over Mira? Simon sat up.
No way! Simon had to do something. But what? Catch up with Bogg? Bogg had a day's head start, and was traveling alone, unhindered by overcivilized twelve-year-olds.
The thought of Bogg in hot pursuit was, somehow, easy in his mind. Obstacles didn't matter. Simon Jones was going to stop the swordsman. He would avenge his family, Bogg's family, Ee's family. He would snuff out the steel plague the swordsman was spreading.
But how?
"Ee!" Simon called. Yesterday, she had appeared around this time--
She peeked around a boulder.
"Ee! I need your help. I'm going after the privateers. Your sling! Can you teach--" Simon stopped, stunned by the words coming out of his mouth. He had said, "Ee! Wo fabi bo. Wo lonni wren naga. Suskah! Eboshan--"
The wild man's gift.
"Your sling," he repeated.
Ee's blue eyes were round and startled. "It is not for humans..."
"Ee, listen. They killed Ahm. They killed my father."
"You... speak well."
"And they're just starting."
She stepped back and crouched, ready to spring to safety. "But you are alone. Your hairy friend has abandoned you."
"He'll need my help." The words came fast, before Simon could doubt them. Maybe Bogg didn't need his help. Maybe Simon would die, or get in the way and get Bogg killed, or both.
No time for that now.
"Po lal Ahm fan oko," Simon said. "That's what you said to me. All along, you've been asking me what I know about Ahm's death, and hoping I would understand you. That's why you saved us on that frozen lake, because I said 'Ahm is murdered.' That's why you stayed with me, here, all night -- to try to find out what I know."
"How are you doing this?" Ee asked.
"Do vivets ever dream of the wild man?"
Ee watched him for a long moment, her green lips parted, her breath coming heavy past her pearl-like teeth. "You've seen the wild man?"
>
"He gave me the speaking I'm using now. I saw him die."
"Impossible, Simon. I think you've been talking to other vivets."
"Who is he? Ee... please."
"There are old stories of vivets who go seeking the wild man. The skyman, he is called, or the One Who Walks Between the Trees. The vivets travel far, have adventures -- they are good stories -- but they all end the same way. The vivet travelers learn some wisdom, but the wild man is never found."
"Never?"
"He only comes to us in dreams, Simon. And only some of us."
"Well, he came to me," Simon insisted. "I have to save him."
"He cannot die! Or so the stories say."
"I don't think so. He might really be out there. Somewhere."
"How could you save him?"
"By stopping the people who killed Ahm."
Ee's eyes narrowed. "One human kills vivets. Another says he dreams of the wild man and asks for my sling. Maybe you're a liar with a gift for languages, and you're going to join the people who killed Ahm."
Simon flinched. But why wouldn't she think that? "They've taken from you, they've taken from me, from Bogg, from countless others. I'm going after them."
Ee's skepticism slipped away and her little mouth hung open.
Simon waited for her to speak, but she didn't. He raised his hands, pleading. "Don't you want that? Justice? Revenge? Anything? To save their future victims? What's with you people?"
Ee glanced to the fire and seemed to shrink a little. "I want it."
"Then let me--"
"But the other vivets don't. They think the privateers are cursed. Too dangerous. They are only passing through, so... let them pass."
Simon stepped closer to her and held Ahm's necklace in his fingers. "These seeds. I understand them now."
Her head drew back and she peered down at his hands as he counted each pierced bit. "This acorn. The necklace starts here, and the acorn represents Ahm's birth. Or his hatching, or when he sprouted; I don't get that part of vivet life yet. All necklaces begin with an acorn."
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