The Wanderers
Page 16
The cage did not so much fall into the water as collide with it. Then its weight took it down, and the water was all there was.
Kean saw the water engulf the cage and drag it under. In a fury, he charged the guard into the nearest Self-Examination Cell. There was a jangle as they fell in a heap. Keys. Kean wrenched them from the man’s belt and staggered back to the steps. The giant was nearly on top of them, his face distorted with pain and hatred.
For one frozen moment, Kean hesitated. The first guard arrived behind him and grabbed him, trapping both his arms against his chest. Kean bent his legs and twisted and shoved. Locked together, they staggered back to the cells, where Kean smashed the man against solid rock, breaking his hold. He got a grip on him, spun around and heaved, and the guard found himself thrown into the arms of the oncoming colossus. They went down the stairway backward, bumping and crashing against stone and rock.
For Kean, it was four light, quick steps to the big drop, and he jumped as far as he could, out and up … and far, far down to the water.
Plummeting through an uprush of air, he saw how disturbed the water was; it had somehow gone into motion. Even if he had been able to swim, it was now charging along so strongly that he would have had no chance of guiding himself. He smacked into the surface of the water as if it were near solid, and then it was like being swallowed by the biggest, hungriest lizard that ever lived.
Everything was traveling the same way, in a roaring, rolling mass. Within seconds, he had arrived at the same place as the cage. The bars battered at him, and he clutched onto them to stop the water from sucking him away. Empty of air, it felt as if his chest would implode. He could not open the cage; it was all he could do to hang onto it, while behind the bars, the girl was drowning.
He had his eyes squeezed shut, and it was a shock when his head was suddenly clear of the water and he could breathe again. He took in deep gulps of air and gazed around wildly as his eyes blinked away the water. Maxamar was flooding the tunnel as a last desperate measure to clear it of the invaders. The reservoir had emptied itself almost completely, except where its floor was lower than the conduit into the tunnel, and this was the case here. There was still six feet of water left, and it was in this shallow pool that the girl lay within the locked cage, submerged, still drowning, if she was not already dead. The keys—where were they? He’d lost them. She was dead. He had to try to get a hand to her and lift her head up …
When he moved, painfully, he felt something hard against his stomach: the keys had fallen into his tunic and lodged there. There was a chance, still. He climbed up onto the cage, looking at her body just under the water, a limp bundle. The lock was on the top side of the cage where it had come to rest. The second key he tried fitted and turned the lock easily. He swung the door up, and jumped down and manhandled the body out of the water. Wet and lifeless, she weighed as much as Ax, it seemed, and he lurched to the side of the cage holding her in his arms. They banged hard against the bars—and the girl began to cough up water in short gouts. He felt the spasms going through and through her, felt her trembling, and held on to her.
From over his shoulder, she said faintly, “You can let go now.”
EIGHTEEN
He moved her away to arm’s length. Couldn’t let go, or she’d fall. She was a mess. And she said, “What are you looking at?”
He smiled, and the achievement of not letting her die energized him to the point of elation. “You’re okay!”
She took his hands off her shoulders and said, with difficulty since she hadn’t yet gotten enough air to talk—and with annoyance that she sounded rather curt and formal—“Yes. You’re okay, too. We’re both okay.”
Then neither of them could think of anything to say, so Kean went back to doing things, because that was what he was good at. He pulled himself out of the cage and reached down for her hand. She took it and, remembering her manners, looked at him full-on and said, “Thank you.” Later she was annoyed about that, too, because out of nowhere, a lot of feeling had gone into it. Too much.
When they were out of the water and standing together at the bottom of the reservoir, bruised and numb, angry shouts drew their attention. At this angle, they could see the top of the steps up to the cells. The figure of Maxamar appeared there, by himself, backing up the stairs for some reason that was not yet apparent.
Into view came the first of the Cruisers. They were going up the steps after him, metal adornments glinting, carrying gutguns. Hawkerman was with them.
They heard Maxamar cry out in a rich voice, “In killing me, you kill all that is fine! I despise you!”
One of the Cruisers fired.
Kean and Essa watched. The stubby bolt embedded itself in Maxamar just above the knee. He gasped, and then there was silence.
No more shots were fired; the Cruisers waited, perhaps held back by the enormity of butchering a Prime Conscience.
Maxamar came down one step. “You … creatures of dirt!” he choked oddly. The wounded leg gave way, and he staggered, flailing his arms. His long fall was graceful for a whole two seconds, until he cannoned into the rocky walls of the reservoir and became a sack of loose clothes and limbs, plummeting to destruction.
Essa looked at the thing that had been Maxamar, lying on the bottom of the empty reservoir, embracing the slimy rock with wide-stretched arms. Kean pulled her away.
“We’re not safe,” he told her. “Stay down.” He scrambled up the tall steps and appeared at ground level in view of the invaders. He called to Hawkerman and narrowly missed death at the hands of two of the Cruisers, who wanted to shoot him because of the tunic he wore.
The Cruiser commando force had arrived and entered the torn Pyramid as planned, if a little late. Led by Hawkerman, they stormed through the corridors and passages to the main gates and opened them. While suffering great losses, men and women from the Wanderer army had driven their way through the Bleachers in the fields and now poured into the city, battling their way through the many barricades. Their determination was strengthened when the word passed around that their underground force had been decimated by the flooding ordered by Maxamar.
There was something Essa wanted to do. Had to do. However shaken she had been by her experiences in the reservoir, she would not be swayed. It was what her dead parents would have wished her to do. It was her duty.
Kean told her, “We’re not dressed right to be safe. If your people don’t try to kill us, then mine will.”
“If Arcone is going to be destroyed, I want to be the first to reach the Archive. Everything that’s known about our lives here is in that chamber. Do you think it’s going to survive intact?”
“I’m more worried about us surviving intact. Why is it so important to you?”
“Don’t you ever wonder why we’re here? What we’re for? Where we came from?”
“We’re here to survive,” Kean said. “The rest is just words.” But his curiosity was stirred. “Come on, then.”
It was worse than before in the city. There was no pattern to the fighting, and danger threatened at each corner they turned. Everywhere the Cruisers and Wanderers went, they left holes in the fabric of Arcone. The tearing winds swept through the corridors and apartments, wreaking more damage than the outlanders could ever hope to accomplish by themselves.
After leaving the reservoir, Essa and Kean found themselves almost engulfed in a hand-to-hand struggle between Wanderers and a group of desperate citizens. Kean pulled Essa back, and they took a turning into an empty passageway where a tremendous blast of wind blew them off their feet. They crawled on to the next turning underneath the force of the charging air.
Two minutes later, they stood outside Grollat’s apartment, having survived an encounter with a dozen terrified electricians who had gone berserk with fear and were stampeding along like greenback deer, going nowhere but going there very fast.
“Get in,” Essa said. It was the pulley-drawn lift, unmanned now. Together they hauled it up through the leve
ls, catching glimpses of carnage as they went.
When they arrived at the level of the Archive, Grollat was waiting for them.
The Commander slid into view as they hauled on the ropes, first his legs and then the rest of him. He was a fearsome sight, alone and with a long gash down his face, yet of all the people they had seen, he looked the least concerned. In one hand he carried one of the short pacifors; the other held a heavy metal bar for action at close quarters. He lifted it.
“Get out,” he said evenly.
They did so, slowly. Essa had no doubt he would kill them then and there. Instead he went past them and got into the lift.
He remarked conversationally, “I guess you’re going to the Archive.”
Essa nodded.
“Stubborn. There’s nothing there of any value.” He waved the iron bar in a dismissive gesture. “There’s nothing anywhere here of any value.”
He nodded at Kean with a savage, dangerous smile, his eyes very bright, and let his weapons fall to the floor of the lift. He bent to pull upward on the chains, and the lift started down. The last they saw of the Commander were his burning eyes gazing up at them, communicating some sort of bitter joke.
This level was deserted, and the air was momentarily calm. They pounded along, tired. An eager breeze sprang up from nowhere and overtook them, as if it were on some form of secret scouting mission. Had they known it, this was a warning.
Essa had no lucid idea anymore of what it was she was trying to do. The encounter with Grollat had disoriented her.
The Archive doors were locked. They cut their way in at the corner where Grollat had caught Essa on the last occasion she had attempted to enter the forbidden chamber.
It was tall and stately, a kind of cathedral with holy relics in it. Scores of tiny lights glimmered in the arched ceiling like stars, disseminating a shadowy, hushed atmosphere. At the back of the chamber was the largest and oldest of all the tapestries in Arcone. It was so faded that its original beauty could only be guessed at, and it presented to the beholder an impossibly perfect vision of Arconian life, in which happy, golden-haired children played outside the glorious Pyramid, which was decorated with twining creepers and flowers.
Tall cases lined the walls. As Essa knew, in these were the official histories, perfectly presented, beautifully illustrated, and ultimately no more than propaganda. They held no interest for her. Nor did the oblong cases set on low wooden platforms in a perfect circle, each covered in its own individual tapestry. They held historical artifacts. In the middle of them was a stone box, placed simply on the floor.
Outside in the fields, the fighting had stopped for a while—the winds had reached a new force, flattening the combatants to the ground.
In the Archive, the floor began to tremble. Somewhere in the terminally damaged Pyramid, the hurricane searched its way into a design fault and achieved diabolical velocity. A panel in the flooring shot up and smashed into the ceiling, shattering some of the lights.
“We’ve got to get out!” Kean shouted.
“Not yet!”
Suddenly the winds were raging in the chamber. Essa fought her way through to the very center of the Archive and wrestled with the lid of the stone box. Behind her, the cabinets against the walls swayed and crashed to the floor. Another floor panel shot up and spun into the outer wall, high up, punching a small hole, a peephole out into the valley. The winds began to work on it.
Kean was at Essa’s side. Plastic papers and heavier tablets were flying through the air and ricocheting off the walls. When they had wrested off the top of the box, a soft glow met their eyes. It came from a dehumidifier that preserved the contents of the box—a pile of brittle papers—real paper, the first time Essa had seen such a substance. The sight did not last long. Freed after centuries of captivity, the papers stirred and were snatched into the turbulent air. Essa grabbed at one as it flew up, and held on. She and Kean rose to their feet, reaching for the papers, and then rose higher, caught by a tempest which took hold of them and hurled them up against the big tapestry. All the breath was knocked out of them, and then they were smothered in the dusty tapestry itself as it detached from the wall.
Struggling against asphyxiation, neither Kean nor Essa knew that the outer wall was breaking up into its constituent panels and flying into the night. The winds had decided to make their greatest vortex here in the place most revered by Arconians, to pluck up everything in the room and cast it out into the darkness. The tapestry, with Kean and Essa trapped inside, flew the farthest and highest, an ill-wrapped shroud.
Outside the Pyramid, a few of the adversaries were trying to fight again in the fields, wrestling as much against the terrible wind as against each other, their murderous intent made comical by the conditions. Most lay prone on the ground, where the wind was weakest. Some had their heads raised to the speeding air, and were witnesses as portions of Arcone exploded upward. The electrical system had gone wrong, and the fresh supply of power from the windmills was overloading the regulators. There were eerie flashes of blue light and fizzing sparks. Among the detritus showering out of the Pyramid were many airborne bodies, both the newly dead and those who would die when they hit the ground. It was only when the roof of the garden floor cracked and broke that the annihilation stopped, and the winds traveled unhindered through the great Pyramid, with no more resistance to excite their anger.
Two miles away, the tapestry unfurled as it fell into the fine-grained sand of the Big White with such a bone-crushing thud that Kean and Essa lost consciousness. The Season reminded itself of its duties and let loose a barrage of rain so light that, accelerated by the tempest, it was an instrument of torture, a liquid whip made up of a million lashes.
Essa was the first to come around, with the sharp needles of water stinging her exposed face. The piece of paper from the Archive was still in her hands, and she did not know it.
She shut her eyes so tightly against the painful rain that warm patches of color sprang up behind her eyelids. She allowed herself to believe it: she was alive, and it was so good. The paper! She had it. It was getting wet, except the water ran right off, because it was protected by a film of synthetic polymers. Even so, take no risk with it. She made herself into a ball and used her whole body to protect it.
Kean groggily assessed their situation and decided that, however long it took, they had to get back to the Lakes by making a wide circuit around the Pyramid, in order to avoid any bloodshed that might still be taking place. As they would discover later, sporadic killing would continue for a good few days.
The sandy terrain was strangely hard underfoot, like walking on densely packed powdered crystal. Even after they had climbed through the crumbling dangers of the low valley walls to the north of the Pyramid, at the mouth of the Big White, the journey took many hours, heads bent low against the wind and rain. Often they fell, and always Essa had the welfare of the precious piece of paper as her priority.
They were not the only stragglers traveling back to the Lakes that afternoon. To avoid being spotted and killed as Bleachers, Kean ensured they kept out of sight of everyone. When a portion of the victorious Wanderer army made a triumphant return into the Lakes, they took advantage of the distraction and crept into the immense hollow from another direction as daylight faded.
It was their great good fortune that one of the first people they came upon was Wailing Joe. He was just about mobile, with a limp that would in time become worse, not better. He took them back to Hawkerman’s old camp by the big acacia, where he’d dug himself a covered dwelling to see out the winds. It was amazing he had mustered the strength to do that much. And amazing he could think of so many questions to ask.
“Yes—yes, I’ll tell you all about it,” Kean said wearily. Instead, when all three were wedged into Joe’s bachelor loading, steaming and so tightly packed that it was like being back inside the tapestry, he fell asleep before he was halfway through his story. Beside him, Essa had succumbed to exhaustion long before.
Hawkerman had gone off again almost at once, taking Barb, Wil, and Cara with him, and Kean was left as company for Essa and Wailing Joe. When the remainder of the team reappeared, they were dragging with them the old trailer, a casualty of the Season. Repairs to it took several days.
“This is history being made here,” Wailing Joe exclaimed, “and all you’ve got on your mind is an old trailer.”
“It’s a good one,” Hawkerman replied. “Wouldn’t want to lose it.”
Over the next two weeks, settled at the Lakes in some degree of comfort now, the team and Essa kept themselves apart from the making of history.
Kean and Essa had time to talk. They were so easy together that both felt it odd that they did not know more about each other. He told her what life was like in a good team. Essa told him about her talks with Grollat, and how her parents had died. About the strictures of life in the Pyramid.
She said, “Things are going to change. Arcone can’t go on as it did.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I don’t care anymore. I lost interest in it when it was beaten.”
He was so strange, she thought. And so likeable. That hand of his was only a distinguishing mark, that was all. She liked him more because of it, not less.
NINETEEN
Hawkerman was asked to represent the Wanderers in the formal peace talks, along with Frumitch, and declined, to everyone’s surprise. He said privately, “What does a do-gooder get? Abuse. Anyway, give it ten years and we’ll be back where we were. The Pyramid will be fixed up, only not looking so good, and some of the Cruisers will be citizens there, and the old business starts all over. Those who have and those who don’t.” They got news from a variety of sources. Hawkerman was by now a legend at the Lakes, and men stopped by every day to talk to him or just be seen with him. The team learned how Frumitch and the canny old historian, Nastor, had done a deal. Nastor called it a “realignment of ideologies,” and what it meant was free trade between the two societies and the right for Lakesiders to enter the Pyramid to conduct business. And there would henceforward be a fairer distribution of water, albeit in a system so complicated that few could begin to make head or tail of it.