by Sean Stewart
—six degrees Celsius, her familiar said,
it was already, and anyway she had tried. She really really had, and damned if she was going to cry, she had nothing to cry about. It would have to be someone else who rescued those children; poor unlucky innocents, they froze too, out there on the Bridge, because even God could not reasonably ask her to do anything more in this hateful freezing eternal hell of a forest. Not even God.
She climbed into the cedar’s trunk. It was dark inside and smelled of wet wood and mud and mold. The floor was a litter of dead leaves and pockets of moss and pine cones, obviously cached here by a chipmunk or a squirrel. Emily forced her way into the hollow trunk and sat staring out into the wet night’s darkness for a long time. Then she commended her soul to the Almighty, turned off her flashlight to save the battery, curled up, and tried to doze.
Brightness exploded across Emily’s closed eyes as her familiar tried to wake her by firing every pixel on her HUD lenses.
Someone was shaking her by the shoulder. “Miss Thompson? Miss Thompson?” A male voice. Southside accent. Had to be a soldier. She had been caught. A flashlight beam played over one side of her face. “Miss Thompson?” His fatigues rustled as he bent over her. “Miss Thomp—”
Emily jerked up, smashing his nose with the back of her head. Twisting, she drove an elbow into his stomach. “Goddammit!” The soldier’s flashlight fell to the ground but didn’t break. Emily dove out of the tree trunk and tried to scramble into the forest.
The soldier was faster. Incredibly fast. One arm grabbed her around the waist. She folded, then snapped back with her head. This time he was ready for it and she missed. He grabbed one of her wrists. She spun into him, free arm going for a back-knuckle strike. He crimped her wrist in a joint lock. Sparklers of pain went pinwheeling up her arm and suddenly she was on her belly trying not to scream.
“I’m not out to get you. I’m a friend.”
“From the Southside?”
“Yes.”
Emily went limp, as if sobbing with relief. The soldier crouched behind her. “How long have I been lost?” she said.
His fingers loosened around her wrist. “I’m not sure. More than a day.”
“It seemed like forev—” Still talking, she jerked her arm back, hard, smashing his nose again with her elbow. He staggered back and she jumped down the path.
She got maybe three meters before he tackled her. This time he put an elbow lock on her. It felt like her cartilage was tearing, burning, bleeding. She couldn’t think for the pain. She found herself trying to burrow through the ground to escape it, twisting, anything to take the pressure off, driving her face into the cold wet ground of moss and mud and cedar needles. “Ah, please! God! Please!”
“Shut up.” Blood from his nose dripped onto her neck. He spoke very softly. “I am your only friend in this world, Miss Thompson.” He slid his hand down her arm to her wrist. Much of the pain in her elbow faded immediately, leaving a hot, torn, buzzing sensation behind. His knowing fingers slid one thin pain into her wrist like a hot needle and held it there. “Are you done running?”
She didn’t answer.
“Are you?”
She didn’t answer.
“You better be.”
She wished she could see him. When he touched her, her familiar could pick up GSR figures, but she needed a better look to get an I.D. No pupil dilations in the dark either. She remembered the weight of his body on top of her and the agony in her elbow. “Are you going to rape me, soldier?”
“No!” Genuine shock.
Thank God. “Kill me?”
“No.”
“Then let go of my wrist.”
Silence.
“Let go of my wrist.”
“I think you broke my fucking nose.” Silence. “I’m not a fucking saint, you know.”
Hope began to bloom wildly in Emily’s heart. He was just a kid. One of her kids, one of her soldiers. Sorry for himself. Thank God, thank God, thank God unto the ages and ages.
He let go of her wrist.
Emily fell forward and gave herself a moment to lie curled around her poor wrist. The pain began to fade, but the wrist still felt loose and weak, as if he had unscrewed it, stripped the threads, and then stuck it back on.
He picked up his flashlight, held it inside the cedar’s trunk so its light wouldn’t spill outside, and turned it on. The glare dazzled her. His voice was flat. “My name is Ensign Jacob Lubov. I want to take service under you.”
Her familiar screened his file. Twenty-three years old. Good record. One commendation. Just past his compulsory service. “Are you a deserter, Lubov?”
“Is that what you think?”
“You tell me.”
“No ma’am,” he said. “I’m not a deserter. I’m a traitor. Like you.”
Lubov told her he had been sent into the Forest to find her, only the Forest had consumed his patrol. He had shot his CO to save Raining’s life, and his own. But Raining had been unable to hold onto him. Instead he found himself on a trail that after many wanderings had led him to Emily. The Forest, Emily thought, was a strange, dark, green Power. But then, Christ too was terrible, and the Spirit blinding, and the face of God more fearsome than the face of Satan. Providence had brought her this soldier. For now, he was all the army she had.
Lubov shone the light on his face while Emily dabbed carefully around his nose with a bit of bandage from the first-aid pack in his vest pocket. “This is twice I’ve had it broken, and both times by girls.”
“Wow. How humiliating.”
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Yes.”
“…Oh.”
Emily laughed.
“If I hadn’t been trying not to hurt you, you would have been dead the next second,” Lubov said.
This was obviously true. “That’s got the rest of the blood,” Emily told him. “It’s going to hurt for a while, I’m afraid, and your profile is going to have a little more character. I shouldn’t have been able to catch you like that. What happened to your familiar?”
“I took it off,” Lubov said. Emily’s familiar, long-practiced in the art of reading men, watched his GSR spike suddenly and his pupils widen. His heart rate climbed to ninety-two beats a minute, almost twice his resting rate. “The Forest doesn’t like them,” he said.
They tallied their equipment. Emily still had her cultured ceramic knife, plus a foil parka with four hot-paks in the pockets, and her familiar. Lubov carried standard field kit, including field glasses, a foil pup tent, and rations: packets of juice crystals, powdered milk, salt, and vitamin-fortified beet and beef pemmican strips. Hunger must have been naked on her face, because he handed over the pemmican before she could ask for it. Ravenous as she was, she couldn’t eat more than two strips. “This stuff is awful.”
Lubov raised an eyebrow. “Complain to the civilian authorities.”
“Very funny.”
When she had finished eating, Emily said, “Do you want to know why I left the Southside?”
“No.”
“If you take service with me, you deserve to be told.”
“I said I didn’t want to know.”
Emily touched his hand. “Lubov?”
“Yes.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“I guess,” he said.
A while later he said, “We should start walking. We need to get out of here before hypothermia gets us both. We need to try to find Mrs. Terleski’s house.”
“I think you’re right.”
Neither of them moved.
“I purely hate this fucking Forest,” he said.
“Me too.”
“We were in there, and Wilson went, and Johnson died, and the captain, everybody dead. And I knew I wasn’t going to get out alive. That even if…” The words stopped. He stared into the fire. “That even if I got out, the Forest was inside me. It’s in me, you know. Like it got into Johnson. And no matter what happens, it will always
be in me now.”
“I know.” Emily remembered walking through the woods until she was dizzy, banging into tree trunks, the sad rain dripping on her hood, the choked view, the trees dark and everywhere. Then she thought of her grandfather, his face cut by the cold prairie wind. “But you know, the Southside is like that too.”
They had been walking some time when Emily’s angel spoke.
up
Could you be a little less cryptic? Emily thought, annoyed. Why always these blind urges, these cloudy visions? Why can’t you just, I don’t know, write a letter. Be specific.
up
Emily grunted. “Does the path seem straighter to you?”
“Yeah.” Lubov walked beside her, tireless. They did keep these boys in good shape, anyway. “All day long I felt as if I were just…waiting. As if it didn’t really matter where I walked. But now…now I feel like we’re going somewhere.”
“Up,” Emily said, puffing.
“The exercise will keep you warm.”
“Not on next to no sleep and food it won’t.”
“There’s always another ration bar,” Lubov said sweetly. Emily did not dignify this with a response.
Still the path climbed and the wind blew.
“Hey! I see a light!” Lubov said.
“Where?”
“Up ahead! Come on!”
Emily grabbed his arm. “Wait. Slow down. We don’t know what it means, or who’s there. What if it’s some of your buddies, or some monster or something?”
“As if the Forest isn’t going to take us where it wants,” Lubov said. “Do you really think you can run away from wherever we’re going?”
up! said the monotonous angel. Emily grunted. “You have a point.”
A few minutes later they stumbled into a clearing on the crown of a tall hill. Just up the slope from where they stood a small fire blazed and crackled, blown to brightness by the hard wind. A man and a woman sat by it.
Suddenly the man stood. “I have been waiting for you,” he said.
Emily’s angel pulled violently toward the man, as if drawn to a magnet, but something in his cold voice filled her with dread.
The woman at the fire scrambled to her feet. “Mrs. Terleski!” Private Lubov cried.
Raining stood for a moment with a look of terrible anguish, and then she ran down the hillside and grabbed the young Southside soldier and held onto him for dear life. “Oh, you made it, you made it. I was so sure you were all dead, that everyone was dead. I killed you all. Oh God,” she said. “Oh God, you’re alive.”
Lubov glanced uncertainly at Emily and then put an awkward arm around the small woman from Chinatown. “It’s okay,” he said gently. “I’m all right. We’re all going to be all right.”
“No, not everything is right.” It was the other man, who had stayed by the fire. “Not everything will be all right.” Slowly he rose and walked toward them.
join
meet
touch
But for once Emily did not trust her angel. “Back off,” she said. “Keep your distance. Who are you?”
“My name is John Walker, my name is Walking John, my name is Blackshanks and Halterman and just plain Death, and if you don’t know me, you should, Emily Thompson, for you are the one who has called me home, and here I am at last.”
At this point Ensign Lubov made a funny wheezing kind of noise and fainted dead away, slipping through Raining’s arms. “Now isn’t that just like a Southsider,” she said, laughing and crying at once. “One little god and they go all to pieces.”
“Not quite a god or a Power,” John Walker was saying a few minutes later, when they had Lubov propped up and recovering beside their little fire. “In some ways I am even less than an ordinary man. I started out as only a fragment of Winter, after all. But a child too starts as nothing more than a muddled mix of its parents. It grows. I have grown, as have all the other children who came across the Bridge. You call them demons,” he added, glancing at Emily. “Philandering Meadowlark and bright Finch and The Harrier, that fine white hawk of a woman.”
“Those…that is what became of the twelve children who crossed the Bridge.”
“Thirteen, if you count me,” John Walker said. “And I do. We peopled the North Side, and we did our jobs, and for years we were content. In my own way, I was as great in my kingdom as Winter was in his, and for many years I thought little of him. But lately…Everything is changing. The Powers are waning as once they waxed. If the world fell into a Dream in 2004, then it is almost morning, I think. The snow on the North Side has begun to melt. Powers are dwindling, dying, drying up.”
“Wire has been telling me that for years,” Raining said. “She used to talk to my dad about it. He thought the barbarians from Downtown had attacked us because the Power that knit them together had unravelled.” Coals popped and flared in the dying fire. The cold wind was bitter with the smell of Raining’s burnt offerings, wool and canvas, oil paint and green wood.
“But what does this have to do with you, exactly?” Emily asked. “Or with me? Did you send the visions to my angel?”
“I do not know what visions you mean,” John Walker said. “You burned the sacrifice for me. That fire was the first time I had felt warm since the moment Winter cut me from his belly.” John Walker paused. “He had no right to cast me out. I have come to reclaim what is mine. All these years he has been warm, over on the Southside. While I have been so cold.”
“I do not think Grandfather wants to see you,” Emily said, and she touched the skin just below her right eye, where Winter had hit her when he found her crouched over the funerary pyre she had made for the little dead boy. So he was right, she thought, and I have made anew the link that he had severed between himself and that dead boy, between the Southside and the North.
“Nobody has ever wanted to see me,” John Walker said. “I come for them just the same.”
“Winter can see you all he wants,” Lubov ventured. “Hell, I’m all in favor. But if he sees us, he’s going to have us shot. It’s not much of a threat to you, I guess, but Anna Lubov’s little boy doesn’t want to be blown into three hundred pieces.”
“Would he really shoot his own granddaughter?” Raining asked.
Emily grunted. “Next question? Grandfather responds to leverage. Unless I have an army at my back, the best I could expect would be to be clapped in chains at once. As for Ensign Lubov here, after what he did to save you, the best he could expect would be summary court-martial and execution.”
Rain pulled her coat more tightly around her shoulders. “If—if you promise to get me back my daughter, I can supply you with food and drink and a warm place to sleep tonight. But an army I can’t provide.”
John Walker looked up and laughed grimly. “I can,” he said. “Ninety-seven of Southside’s finest. There’s only one problem with them.”
“What?” Lubov said, bewildered.
This time it was Emily who was quickest to catch on. “They’re dead,” she said.
Chapter
Twenty-three
Water Spider woke on Sunday morning to the smell of tea and the sound of running water, hidden deep and rushing like the blood beneath his skin. I am a spilled man, a spilled man.
But the silent mountain is waiting always.
He was lying on something softer than the table they had strapped him to for his interrogation. He tried to twitch his fingers. A rough hempen sheet rasped against his hand. He opened his eyes. He was lying on a cot in the interrogation room. The only light came through the latticework above the door lintel. It seemed to be quite bright beyond his cell. It was at least midmorning. The gurgling water sound came from the drain in the middle of the floor. Perhaps it was raining again outside. He did not know.
A wooden crate was his bedside table. The tea smell came from a small cup on top of it. He remembered asking for tea many times during his interrogation, but he did not remember anyone bringing it. It seemed very sad to him to have wanted s
omething so badly, and then have no memory of getting it.
Wraiths of steam coiled and drifted from the cup, fragrant ghosts.
He pushed himself up on one elbow and reached for the tea. A twinge of pain tweaked him where David Oliver’s needle had gone in. He was glad someone had brought tea.
The cup was empty. Not only empty, but cold. And dry on the bottom.
He set it down. It was still steaming. Inside the cup, autumn leaves burned in damp air. Smoke swayed and thinned. Water Spider blew out a little puff of breath—fweh! Steam roiled, bent, and gradually straightened. He picked up the cup and tipped it. Nothing came out. He tipped it more sharply, until he was holding it upside down. Not a drop. Warmthless steam crawled around his fingers.
Water Spider eyed the empty cup. Then he lifted the ghost tea to his lips, and drank.
A knock came at the door. It was Claire.
“Come in,” Water Spider said.
“You’re smiling.”
“Curious: to kidnap a man, tie him down, shoot him with needles—then knock for permission to come in! Very polite! Late. But very polite.”
“You know me, always the lady.” Claire stepped in, closing the door behind her. She dropped a bundle of clothes on the crate beside the cot, a red silk tunic and rust-brown rayon pants. “Major Oliver told me you were here. I brought you something to wear.”
Water Spider picked through the soft cloth. Tears crept over his face.
Claire stood by the bed. She seemed enormously tall, stooping over him. Hair the color of frost, eyes pale watery blue. Heavy black boots and camouflage pants, a khaki shirt with the sleeves cut off, exposing her lean shoulders. Her skin was white like snow on the mountain.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked.
“Not very often, even at home. Here, never. You look better. The first time I dropped by you were still strung out on the S and D.”
“S and D?”
“Seconal and Dexedrine. Stimulant and Depressant. First they knock you out—almost. Then they jerk you back with the dex. Then they peel you like a hard-boiled egg.”
There were tears on Water Spider’s face again. He couldn’t seem to stop them anymore; they fell when they would, like the rain. “How much did I tell them?”