Ashes of the Earth

by Eliot Pattison

  Dax began rewrapping his wizard. “The jackals ain’t going away. The jackals have big work to do.”

  “And what’s the price, Dax? What are they forcing you to do to become a full member?”

  The boy just smirked.

  Hadrian wearily rose, searching for something on the young faces, on the magazine pages, that might explain the mystery these children guarded. He should have been angry, yet all he could feel was a deep sorrow. His eyes settled on a solitary advertisement on the back of a door. REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE, it said. With a shaking hand he pulled the ad from the wall. DON’T FORGET THOSE YOU LEFT BEHIND, read another that touted a cellular phone.

  “It was you at his grave!” Why would you bury an old phone with Jonah? he was about to blurt out. Then he saw the pain in the boy’s eyes. “How did you know Jonah?” he asked instead.

  “He would visit our fields sometimes,” Dax explained, gesturing toward the fallow patch of ground outside. “Looking for insects, birds, even flowers. We would help him. He brought books to us, sometimes he read to us. About a great white fish. About Indians. Last month he brought that book about pirates and we sat around a fire as he read. ‘Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest.’” For the first time Hadrian noticed a shelf of books by the aisle that led to the rear of the mill. He saw Treasure Island. Kidnapped. Ivanhoe. Robinson Crusoe. Huckleberry Finn. Swiss Family Robinson.

  Hadrian felt a flush of shame. If he had not been drunk or in jail so often over the past few months, he would have known, probably would have joined Jonah on such trips. “What would you want him to talk about if he called?”

  Dax shrugged. “Say I’m sorry about the saw pit.”

  “Saw pit?”

  “He was going to meet us there in two days. To read the end of the pirate book. And explain the pictures.”

  “What else, Dax? You didn’t bury a phone to apologize about missing a reading. What else would you ask about?”

  The boy shifted uncomfortably. “About who’s got the words now. About the running.”

  Hadrian gazed at him, struggling to understand. “Are you saying you were doing work for Jonah?”

  Dax gazed at him in silence for a long moment then spun about to the crew of his strange little ship. “Man the boats!” he called out.

  Like mice in the night Dax and the children disappeared into the shadows.

  A THIN, BLACK-HAIRED doctor was bent over Jamie Reese writing on a medical chart as Hadrian arrived at the second-floor room. The comatose man still lay on the bed where Hadrian had last seen him.

  “Any change?”

  The doctor started, caught off guard, then straightened. “None for the better,” he muttered, then passed Emily as he slipped out of the room.

  “You can’t just walk in like some kind of intruder, ignoring the woman at the front desk,” Emily groused. She was out of breath from running up the stairs. “She wanted to send for the police.”

  “I thought the police were protecting him.”

  “The governor declined your request.”

  Hadrian lifted Reese’s hands, the scarred, callused hands of a fisherman. “What else have you learned about him?” he asked.

  “He shouts out sometimes, like he’s having nightmares.”

  “Shouts what?”

  “More like cries of terror. Nothing coherent. Once he sat up shaking with fear and said a flock of snakes with wings was chasing him.”

  He reached over to open the man’s eyelids.

  “Hadrian, no, let him be. He—” Emily’s protest choked off with a gasp.

  The patient’s irises were pale blue, almost so light in color as to be invisible against the whites of the eyes. Hadrian was looking at a ghost.

  As Hadrian stared in disbelief he became aware of movement behind him, followed by another cry of alarm. Sergeant Waller stood at his shoulder.

  “Does it mean he is dead?” she asked in a frightened whisper.

  “No, Jori,” Emily replied. “He still has a strong pulse.”

  Hadrian stepped between Reese and the police officer. “I told you I would find you in a couple of days.”

  The sergeant seemed to struggle to turn her gaze from the figure on the bed to Hadrian. “I didn’t know you were here.”

  Emily put a hand on his arm. “Jori’s from a good family, Hadrian,” she said, as if apologizing on her behalf.

  Hadrian looked in confusion from one woman to the other. “Where the sergeant comes from,” he said slowly, “is the governor and Kenton. She’s been assigned to report on me. She is a brilliant actress. Wanted me to believe she was just a middling clerk.”

  Before Waller could reply, Emily pulled on Hadrian’s arm as if to distract him. “What do you expect? Buchanan would never give you a free hand without keeping watch.”

  Hadrian stared at the doctor, struggling to understand why she seemed to be defending the sergeant. “Perhaps you forget I used to award badges at our police graduations,” he said, an edge of bitterness in his voice. “That’s when they take a vow to maintain justice and protect the people.”

  His words seemed to disturb Waller. She slowly looked up. “My father was a policeman in the . . . he was a policeman before,” she said in a tight voice. “All he had were daughters. I was the oldest.”

  Emily seemed unaware that her hand was still on Hadrian’s arm, or how tightly it was squeezing him. “You need to go, Jori,” she said. There was an odd entreaty in the doctor’s voice.

  Hadrian looked down at Reese. “You mean you came to see him?”

  Sergeant Waller pursed her lips together and nodded. “When I used to investigate on my own, my cases never came together. Then the governor began to take a personal interest in my work, as if he were training me for something. My last big case was in the fishery. There was reason to suspect smuggling by the head of the fishery guild, Captain Fletcher. Fletcher the One Eye, the working man’s representative on the Council. The governor gave me papers that said I was a health inspector. Then Fletcher offered me a bribe to leave him alone. I said no. I think that’s what caused him to suspect me. He tried to scare me away. I finally found a crew member willing to talk about trips in the north, about fish being offloaded illegally outside Carthage and other cargoes being loaded. About strangers from outside Carthage meeting on fishing boats.”

  Hadrian considered her words a moment, wondering whether she was acting now. He regarded the figure in the bed. “You mean the hero from the sinking of the Anna was your source,” he said.

  “I think the governor had a plan to arrest one of the biggest criminals in Carthage, then put his own man in charge of the fishery. But then Jamie disappeared. Never showed up at a scheduled meet, never came back aboard his ship when it docked.”

  “Not,” Hadrian suggested, “until he had had his accident.”

  “The governor was furious. He called me incompetent. He said I didn’t have a clue about how life worked in Carthage.”

  Hadrian weighed her words. “You mean you were supposed to accept the bribe,” he said after a moment. “It’s the world Buchanan lives in. He was certain Fletcher would offer a bribe, certain you would accept it. Then he would confront Fletcher.”

  “But Fletcher was on the Council by then,” Emily inserted. “Buchanan wouldn’t want the scandal.”

  “There would be no scandal. Buchanan wouldn’t want to arrest Fletcher, he would want to control him. The sergeant and Fletcher would become new pawns because Buchanan could throw them in prison at any time. Except,” he added, “the sergeant upset his plans with her unexpected honesty.”

  “He put me on suicide patrols for a month,” Waller said, “watching tall trees on the ridges, and threatened to fire me if I failed him again.”

  “You came here to resurrect your old case?” Hadrian asked.

  Waller looked down at Reese. “What if what happened to him was because of me?”

  Hadrian gazed at the sergeant as if seeing her for the first time. “Dangerous se
ntiments for someone working for the governor.”

  “Working for the governor,” Waller replied, “is an honor few members of the corps ever get.”

  “That’s better,” Hadrian said as she cast him a smoldering glance. “Now tell me. The two men who follow me. Do they report to you or Kenton?”

  She grimaced. “Officially they are assigned to me. But Kenton gets whatever information he wants from them, whenever he wants, without bothering to ask me.”

  “Let them keep up their playacting,” he instructed her. “And resurrect your old case by all means. I don’t need to see you again. Write up your report on me and give it to the governor in a couple of days. Mark it secret, so Kenton will be sure to read it. Show them at last you have grasped the essence of good police work. Say your subject exhibits dangerous antisocial behavior, that he harbors delusional suspicions of criminal conspiracies taking root in Carthage. If left unchecked, he threatens to be the seed for a whole new hooligan class. Don’t forget his psychotic tendency to believe only he knows how to discover the truth.”

  Emily fixed him with a withering gaze. “I have medicine that will shut him up, Jori.” She moved closer to Waller as if to protect her.

  Hadrian smiled grimly. “I took my last medicine twenty-five years ago, Em, and never woke up.”

  CHAPTER Four

  HADRIAN WATCHED FROM a window in an empty hospital room as Sergeant Waller conferred with her two men on the rain-slick street below, pointing to the second-floor corner room where she’d last seen him. Then he darted into the corridor, down to the kitchen, and out the back door. Minutes later he stood at a large building whose four chimneys churned out clouds of wood smoke. The textile works in its early years had been constructed to turn salvaged fabric into fibers for papermaking. It had eventually expanded and now took in raw wool to be processed into cloth for the colony’s apparel makers.

  “I’m looking for the owner,” Hadrian said to the woman who sat at the front desk. She appraised him coolly as he self-consciously pushed back his ragged hair, then she disappeared behind a closed door. He waited several minutes before she reappeared, gesturing him inside with a frown.

  He followed her past great steaming vats, through a room stinking of wet wool, into a huge chamber filled with carders and spinners, then up a staircase to a quiet room where half a dozen large looms were being worked. Hadrian stood uncertainly after the woman turned and abandoned him. Looking about, he saw a stocky, bearded man by a rear window, who gestured to him with his pipe.

  Hadrian knew Hastings from years earlier, when the burly man had supervised the construction of the school, but had had little contact with him since he had gone into private enterprise. He stood silently as Hastings filled and lit his pipe, puffing out richly scented clouds.

  “I’m not sure how this is supposed to go,” the mill owner stated. “Am I supposed to cooperate with you because the governor finally took the yellow band off your arm or throw you out for being the feckless antisocial ass he has always told us you are?”

  Hadrian breathed in the fragrant tobacco smoke. There was something almost church-like about the quiet industrious air of the loom chamber. “I think I’d rather you cooperate because I am the feckless antisocial ass he warned you of.”

  Hastings grinned, then spoke in a near whisper. “At bedtime when the youngsters climb under their comforters my wife and I tell them of the way it was when we were young. But we make them promise never to speak of it at school.”

  It was an extraordinary confession, a gesture of trust, a renewal of old friendship.

  Hadrian offered a grateful nod. “Including your son Micah?”

  “When he was younger, yes.”

  “Is that why he was so eager to go on a salvage scout?”

  Hastings round face seemed to grow thinner. “I told him more than half never make it back. Hell, we don’t even know if it’s disease or radiation or wild beasts that take them. But at that age they feel immortal. He had become a market hunter. He knew the woods, thought he’d be the one to blaze new trails, like those early pioneers in the lessons. Every day his mother keeps hoping for a message from one of the other hunters. I keep reminding her that his was a long scout, beyond the usual hunting lands.”

  “Did he tell you where?”

  “Southwest somewhere, he said. “Then Buchanan wanted him to follow the old canal there toward the old factory towns along what was the Hudson River. Christ knows I told him those towns got hit hard,” Hastings muttered, “that they still could be hot with radiation. He could hike a month in a hot zone and never know until he dropped. I wanted him to learn this business since he was the eldest but he said I had other sons for that.”

  Hadrian hesitated over the distant way the father spoke of Micah. “Before he left, was he in some kind of trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  Hadrian shrugged. “With the law. With the gangs. With paying debts. There are a lot of reasons someone might want to leave for a few weeks or months.”

  Hastings gazed at him as he worked the pipe stem in his mouth. “Of course not,” he said, then hesitated. “Not that I know of,” he amended with an edge of worry in his voice. “He was making new friends, frequenting taverns along the waterfront. He’d moved into rooms with a friend from the fishery. We hardly ever saw him.”

  The low murmurs of the looms filled the silence that followed. Hastings turned to face the window. “There’s folks who say that Buchanan thought Jonah Beck was getting too powerful,” he said abruptly.

  Hadrian grew very still. This was dangerous ground. “I was just wondering about the fire.”

  “There was a fireman who saw Jonah hanging,” Hastings said. “He got drunk, starting saying the fire didn’t start elsewhere in the building, but right there in the workshop. And not where Jonah could have started it by kicking a lantern. People are saying we can’t trust the newspaper anymore.” He fixed Hadrian with a somber gaze. “If you’re so interested in the fire, then why ask about a scout patrol five months ago?”

  Hadrian didn’t reply. The starting place wasn’t the scouting mission, it was the link between Jonah, Buchanan, and the scout.

  Hastings waved his pipe toward the courtyard below, where a thin, careworn woman was watching two small children play in the puddles. “Don’t burden her with all these questions, Boone. She’s troubled enough not hearing from Micah.”

  Then the woman looked up, telling the children to wave to their father, and suddenly Hadrian had the answer he had come for.

  THE OLD MILL appeared empty as Hadrian approached. There were no boys with lethal bows nor any acrobat on the waterwheel. He stepped cautiously inside, studying the old works, running his hand along the tops of beams, testing for a loose floor board that might conceal a hiding place. He froze as overhead the ceiling creaked. Footsteps rose, then faded, moving toward the ladder at the far end of the building. He waited, listening. When no one appeared from the corridor of small chambers below the ladder, he stole into the shadows, remembering now how Dax had momentarily disappeared when retrieving his precious figurine.

  The boy was in what had been the mill foreman’s office, lying under a hanging lantern on a bench that extended the length of one wall, gazing intently at the little wizard in his hand. From just beyond the entry Hadrian studied the chamber, trying to discern where the boy kept his treasure hidden. There was a wooden bucket with a sack in it. A work station was built into the opposite wall, consisting of a narrow desk with a single small drawer. Above it were planks with rows of nails where once had been pinned orders and invoices. One plank was slightly ajar.

  “That day up on the ridge,” Hadrian said abruptly, standing in the doorway to block any attempted retreat, “Kenton said he’d seen you the night before, spoke about looking for something you had. What was it?”

  Dax, holding the wizard to his chin as if for protection, watched him warily, not offering a reply.

  “I am trying to help, Dax. What do you do for t
he jackals?”

  “We do fine without help.”

  Hadrian realized how little he knew about the boy. He was not quite a child, nor yet an adult. Now he recalled the boy speaking of orphans. “What happened to your parents?”

  “Crossed over, years ago,” Dax answered in a flat voice. “My uncle says he don’t have time for delinquents whenever he sees me.”

  “What did Kenton do the night before?”

  “Cornered us in one of the stables. Took two of the older ones for a salvage crew, hauling rails over the mountains for a couple months.”

  “Older?”

  “Eleven, maybe twelve. Says he will keep taking one of us every week.”

  “But surely their parents—”

  “Orphans too. Live at the school, like I do when it gets too cold to sleep here. Kenton fixes things with the teachers when he wants us.”

  Hadrian could barely contain his emotion. The police corps seemed to be spreading its tentacles further every week. “He threatened you but doesn’t take you. Which means he took the others as salvage slaves to put pressure on you. What do you have that he wants?” As he spoke Hadrian stepped away from the door, to give the boy a chance to escape. Dax did not move, except for the tiniest flicker of his eyes toward the desk.

  Hadrian was an instant faster than the boy and already had his hand on the loosened board when Dax grabbed his arm to stop him. Hadrian pulled the board out, reached inside, and extracted a rolled-up piece of paper.

  Dax seemed to coil, as if to leap at him. But Hadrian shoved him forcibly onto the bench and unrolled the paper on the desk.

  It was a hand-drawn map. Its central feature was a long, arcing curve facing east below a meandering line with little waves above it. There were no other features except the image of a snarled, dead tree to the west of the curve and small circles placed equidistant along the arc, all with dates below them. Ten circles, seven of which had X’s inscribed in them.