Dustfall, Book Two - The Parting of Ways

by J. Thorn

  “You have to leave, boy,” said the woman.

  Gaston looked into her eyes. This woman had become like a second mother to him, taking him in after the loss of his clan — the loss of his own parents at the hands of T’yun.

  He shook his head , and his long bangs dangled before his eyes. He left them there so they would hide the tears. “I will stay with you.”

  “No,” she said with a hacking cough. “You must leave. There is nothing left here but death and sickness. It is the blight. It has come to take us. But you, my dear Gaston, you are different. It lets you live.”

  He took the moist rag and wiped the woman’s face. Her lips moved as if she were about to speak again. But instead, the skin on them cracked and blood dribbled down her chin. Gaston looked at the sores on her neck and arms, and although he resisted the morbid fascination to check, he knew they covered the rest of her body as well. He saw them on all of the corpses.

  When the blight first arrived, the clan’s elders prescribed the same course of action : treat the sick, read the b ook and wait for the gods to take the undeserving. The e lders had often used the sickness as an excuse to grab plots of land or influence from the most powerful among the clan. It would pass , and those surviving would be left stronger, both physically and politically.

  But then the e lders died. The affluence that had protected them in the past was ineffective. Even the b ook—dare he think it—did not spare the powerful, the righteous , or the weak. Gaston had watched the bodies pile up in the center of the village , where men would drag them to be tossed on to the fire. And when the men died, the bodies remained where they fell and became food for the carrion that circl ed the dark skies above.

  “That is why I shall stay,” he said to the woman. “The sickness. It can’t get me.”

  The woman smiled , which brought more blood from her cracked lips. She coughed and spat up bloody phlegm. Gaston used the rag to wipe it off her face.

  “It is because the b ook has other plans for you. It will call you to duty someday , and you must not ignore it. This is the contract you now have with the universe.”

  Young Gaston nodded , although he did not understand what the woman was saying . Gaston had questions. He wanted to know if the woman knew the answer. But when he looked back into her eyes, the boy saw the hazy film of death.

  “No, don’t leave me. Please, don’t.”

  The book, Gaston.

  The boy in the memory shivered ; the woman’s voice echoed in his head and yet he could not understand how.

  The book, Gaston.

  “The book, Gaston.”

  He looked up at the man now standing at the foot of Roke’s grave. The woman’s face hovered over the man’s and then dissipated like oily smoke.

  “What?”

  “The book. What does it say?”

  “It says we must leave.” Gaston heard the words flap off his lips before he could stop them. “We must return to Wytheville.”

  Another man appeared. Then another. Most of the remnants of the Elk who followed Gaston to White Citadel had already succumbed to the blight. But those who had clung to life now gathered before him. The men stumbled in close, stepping on Roke’s fresh grave without hesitation.

  “That is lunacy,” said one man.

  “You fucking killed us,” said another.

  Gaston raised the shovel and turned it across his chest, right hand near the spade. He jabbed it at the closing gap between them.

  “You led us here. You killed us all.”

  The men reached out, their eyes on fire and mouths open in toothless grins. Gaston took a step back until he felt the cold bark of an oak tree snag his cloak.

  “You see that I am without sickness.”

  The statement gave them pause. The men stopped and fanned out around Gaston, the tree holding him up.

  “Why is that?” one of the men asked.

  “Because I have this.”

  Gaston reached beneath his cloak and pulled out a glass vial on a leather string. He held it out in front of his face and the men gasped. The dull light glittered off the glass and clear liquid shook inside. The men gazed and none spoke.

  “I purchased this in Wytheville from a medicine woman. She said it is tears of the gods and that any who keep it close to their heart will not succumb to the blight. It is protection.”

  He rolled with the lie as it slid from his tongue. He hoped they would not question the lunacy, demand he cite a passage from the book, or beat an explanation out of his tired body.

  They did none of those things.

  “How much did it cost you?” a man asked.

  “A day’s rations. But I know the woman, and I’m sure I can negotiate with her. I can get you all a vial.”

  The nearest man snickered and turned away from Gaston to face the others. “I say we just take it from the son of a bitch. Let him die here, the same way he sentenced the rest of us to death.”

  The men moved in closer, and Gaston could smell the rot, an aroma like moldy leaves and earthworms.

  “There isn’t enough for all of you,” he said. “You each need your own vial.”

  The men stopped again. A crow flew overhead and cried out, a rare sign of life in the shadow of White Citadel.

  “We trusted you to bring us here, and now look.”

  Gaston smiled, happy they would not question the book or his interpretation of his passage. He put his hand on the vial and remembered the village girl who had given it to him ten years prior. It had been nothing more than a trinket, created by a little girl, and now the powerless piece of glass would save his life.

  Powerless no more , he thought.

  “Come with me, back to Wytheville. I can get vials and keep us all safe.”

  Gaston looked at their faces. Sores festered and oozed. He was not sure if they would make it even half way back, but the road was a dangerous place and Gaston knew his odds would be much better traveling with them, even just a few. Let the vagabonds prey on the sickest.

  “I promise you will not die of the sickness if you follow me...”

  Chapter 56

  Briar moved through the bushes cautiously, using the trees as cover. His group of ragged, tired hunters had followed a long trail over the last two days, and he now wondered if the world had been split in two. The ravine seemed to go on for miles, the extent of the damage far greater than he had expected. He turned to look back over the tired men that followed him, wishing that they could move faster, but Loner’s wound was still healing and he could see the man—now at the back of the group—was struggling but keeping up. He’d examined the wound that morning, and had been relieved that it wasn’t showing any signs of infection, but it would be a while before his best archer would completely heal.

  For that last half a day they had travelled another ten miles along the path of the ravine, keeping a good distance from the edge of the seemingly-endless drop. He tried to keep their bearing southerly, but the weather wasn’t helping his judgement much, and they were forced sometimes to change direction when the path of the ravine changed.

  South to the river was what he wanted, but it seemed he would be at the mercy of the ravine, which seemed to cut and meander in random directions, cutting off their path at the most inconvenient moments.

  He cursed. Thirty-five miles of trailing alongside the massive maw in the earth and still no sign of an end to the wide crack.

  Mother nature is pissed, he thought. Seriously pissed. He had heard grumblings before, and he remembered back to when he was young and they lived on the far peaks to the north, where the weather was always colder. There had always been grumblings up that way, and sometimes a section of the land would collapse, but never anything like this—never had such a huge gaping wound been inflicted upon the land.

  He stopped and wiped the sweat from his brow. It will be time to find a place to camp soon, he thought. It wasn’t dark, yet, but they would need to set up and find a good hiding place to avoid wolves and ot
her people. This was their way, and it would take a couple of hours. He thought this area of the forest was denser and easier to hide in, but still they would need the time.

  Thankfully they were no longer pursued.

  Briar climbed the ridge, glancing back as he heaved himself up the last few feet of rock, and saw that Loner was walking slightly quicker now. Good, he thought. The wound must be sealing up, the muscles stiffening, but Loner was as tough as an old grizzly bear and would push past the aching and stiffness.

  He turned back to face south and then frowned. They had crossed the open grasslands an hour before, a belt of treeless land that had never allowed the forest to creep over it, and he remembered this area of the woods very clearly, for they had hunted there many times. The river was not far. It ran diagonally across the land and he had been expecting to come across the bridge by now.

  Your judgement is getting worse , he thought. You’re getting old.

  He wondered what mess he would find, but whatever ideas he had in his head, it wasn’t what he saw when he finally crested the last rise and saw the bridge below, in the valley. The bridge was still intact, and the river ran down the slope to it, as it always had, but the water stopped flowing underneath the bridge and cascaded down into the massive ravine, which by some fluke of chance now passed directly under where the bridge stood.

  The bridge itself was a massive wrought-iron affair, rusted to hell, that carried the wide blacktop road over the fast-running river and was easily long enough to transverse the ravine.

  But there were two things about the scene below that bothered him—two things that he saw immediately that weren’t right.

  Both spelled trouble.

  The first was that the river was cascading into the ravine, vanishing into the darkened depths of the earth, and the other side, where the river had once continued along into the planes, was now a drying riverbed.

  Those plains will never see the river again, he thought. Those plains will die and with them the herds that feed there.

  But that wasn’t what worried him the most.

  What worried him the most was the gathering of warriors on either side of the bridge.

  He watched them, not moving from his hidden perch among the trees and bushes lining the top of the rise.

  They looked like the ones that chased us through the forest for days, he thought. But surely not? Those ones died back at the ruin, falling to their deaths or eaten by the pack of wolves. But these looked just the same. The same dress, the same bright, white war-paint covered by masks. He was sure of it.

  “More of the bastards,” said the voice of Loner. The man had made his way up the slope and now crouched behind him. “Where the hell did they all come from?”

  Loner spat into the dirt, and Briar turned back to look at the group across the bridge. There were how many? Fifty? Maybe more. On his side maybe a dozen. Far too many for his group to confront.

  “Yes,” he said. “More of them. Another clan, maybe, or just a second warband. It must be a large clan to have so many warriors.”

  Loner nodded. “Never seen folks dressed like that before,” he said.

  Briar had no answer for that but shook his head. He didn’t know who these people were, but he sure would have liked to. Why were they here? It was unusual for large groups to take land that was lived on by others. It didn’t make sense. That was how wars and slaughters started. It never ended well.

  And now they were blocking both sides of the only bridge for miles. As he crouched there behind the bushes, watching, he made out some form of barricade being built on the other side of the bridge. Torn-down trees, and rocks pulled up from the side of the blacktop road, were being piled and lashed together to make a rudimentary wall.

  They were blocking the other side of the bridge.

  “Damn it,” he said aloud.

  “What?” asked Loner.

  “They’re blocking the road,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “Blocking the road on the other side of the bridge,” he said. “They don’t want anyone crossing.”

  Loner frowned. “But why?”

  This bridge must be the only way across , Briar thought. How far does the ravine go? Another ten, fifty, a hundred miles? It could be the only way back to the deeper forests and not just for his group of hunters.

  Soon, he knew, when the weather turned and the thaw began, the clans of Wytheville would need this bridge to get back to their city, the place where he traded what his hunters caught. And what of the forest clans? They too would be heading this way in the coming weeks, also heading back to Wytheville and then north or east up into the forests. All of these people would need to cross this bridge, and now it seemed that some strangers from who knew where were trying to stop that from happening.

  “Because they want the land,” he said.

  He watched for a while, troubled.

  “We need to tell people of this,” said Briar.

  Chapter 57

  “Did you hide the body?” Gerth asked, his voice low. He and Shykar leaned close to each other over the cart, their speech almost in whispers. It wouldn’t bode well for them if the passing refugees, also fleeing from the collapsing ruins in Eliz, overheard talk of killings. There were bound to be “accidents” during the confusion of the city’s exodus, but if someone found a friend missing later on, and remembered his face, it could mean trouble.

  “Of course,” Shykar said. “Got that well covered.”

  “Really?” Gerth asked, not really trusting his lieutenant’s abilities.

  “Laid it with a couple of others that died in that building fall,” Shykar said. “Even shoved a few extra rocks on top of him.” The man laughed.

  Gerth nodded. That will have to do, he thought, hoping that no one would be able to tell that the man had been murdered before the building started to collapse. It wasn’t as though people would be going back there in a hurry. Not with that mess and the damn things from under the city busting out like that.

  Then Gerth grinned. With any luck those things from the tunnels might even take the bodies away, and then the evidence would be someone else’s problem. He stood up and pushed the cart farther toward the Elk encampment, still keeping among the other refugees and staying a good distance from eyes that may recognize him.

  He had no reason to suspect that anyone in the Elk camp would know who he was; so far he’d had no contact with them. But still his ingrained caution prevailed.

  As he watched, leaning on the cart and peering through the entrance to the camp, he caught a brief glimpse of the object of his desire near the gate, speaking to one of the guards, before she headed back into the camp.

  “Is it me or are there less of them in the camp, now?” Shykar blurted. Gerth hushed him and stood watching, while still trying to make it look as though he was sorting through the crap in the cart. They had stolen it from the old man they murdered, and there really was little of use in it, but it worked as cover, and as long as he pushed it, people would believe he was a peddler—and that meant he could get into places.

  He’s right, thought Gerth. There were less warriors in the camp. Though the Elk had swelled vastly in number since their arrival in Eliz, and he had been forced to watch from a distance, angry at his inability to make a move, he had to admit his lieutenant had spotted something interesting.

  Where was that damn leader of theirs? That husband of the woman he wanted to take? If he’d gone out somewhere, on a raid or some other errand that took a lot of warriors, then maybe…

  “Where they gone, you think?” he asked aloud.

  “I dunno,” said Shykar.

  “I wasn’t asking you, you idiot,” said Gerth. “Just thinking out loud.”

  Shykar looked away.

  “We’ll take a path around back of the camp, where those other traders are. See if we can scope it out.”

  Shykar nodded and began pushing once more, mumbling to himself.

  “Just shut it and push,”
Gerth said.

  Chapter 58

  Declan trudged ahead of the others, his pace slightly quicker even though it forced him to stop every mile or so to let Rav, Ghafir, and the dozen warriors that Jonah had sent with them, catch up. He was impatient. Having to make the journey a second time in a week irritated him, but he knew it was necessary. The road to the forest lands was important to the people of the Elk and the other clans that would soon be traveling back to Wytheville and beyond.

  He remembered the conversation with Jonah three days earlier, in the camp. Rav insisted that there was no way the ravine could go all the way down into the valley where the bridge stood. It was miles and miles, he’d said, but Jonah had insisted that they went back to secure the bridge. It was too important, and other scouts had come back with word of dust clouds and grumbles further up in the mountains and down into the valley.

  “If the ravine has split all the way up there, it could also be as far as the flatland and the bridge,” Jonah had said. “We have to know before we get there.”

  Rav had cursed, saying that he would not go, but Ghafir had finally persuaded him, insisting they needed his skills at sensing trouble if they were to make the journey. The gruff old man had finally given in.

  Now, as they crested the first rise that would lead them uphill toward the river and the bridge, Declan wondered if those that had trailed them—the ones Rav had sensed before—were real, or just a figment of the man’s imagination.