by D. J. Butler
“Well,” Dyan said, “to each his Calling.”
She handed several rectangles of Scrip to the trader, careful not to look too carefully at them or show her uncertainty at how he would react. He didn’t look at the Scrip either, just took it, slapped two fingers to his forehead in a sloppy salute, and returned to the work of bellowing at his crew.
“Thank you for making me not exactly a prisoner,” Eirig said when he was gone. “My old dad would be proud. I’ve finally become what he always dreamed I’d be.”
“Well done,” Jak told her. He reached over and squeezed her hand, and his expression was one of real gratitude.
“Why were you asking him about the west, though?” Eirig asked. “If that was small talk, it’s small talk like I’ve never heard before. I’m used to hearing so, Ira, how are the chickens doing this year? Oh, the poultry are fine, Jeet, but you know I’ve never really recovered from that cough and now half the kids have some kind of gut worm.”
Dyan wanted to giggle, but didn’t think it would look right in her Outrider costume. Instead, she shrugged and smiled. “I just wonder,” she said. “The Magisters never taught us anything about what might be downriver on the Snaik, except for exactly the same things the trader just told me. Bandits and wild animals, ruins, lands so blighted by the Cataclysm that it isn’t safe even to pass through, and that sort of thing. But I wonder if that can be true.”
“What do you mean?” Jak scratched behind his ear.
“I mean, the world’s a big place. I can tell you from geology and physics that the world is a ball about twenty-four thousands miles around and about seven thousand miles through the center. That’s an awful lot of space. Can it really all be destroyed, wasted, nothing? Can Buza System and the settlements really be all that there is? Or might some of those ruins that I’ve been told about really be populated?”
“Holy Mother,” Eirig gulped.
“Other Systems?” Jak asked.
“Maybe,” Dyan said. “Or maybe human settlements without Systems. Just … you know … people, without anyone from a System coming out to Cull their children. Just people living together.”
Eirig’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “The earth is a ball?”
“Uh …” Dyan was uncertain what to say.
Jak punched his friend and Eirig laughed.
“My old dad always told me that the world was shaped like a giant turd,” Eirig said. “He was such a traveler, I assumed he knew what he was talking about.”
“Life,” Jak said, “not the world. Your old dad always said that life was a turd.”
“Isn’t it the truth, though?” Eirig shook his head. “And it’s the very best people who always get the worst part of the turd, isn’t it?”
He put his arm around Jak and grinned. Jak grinned back, but there was a tear in his eye.
“Well,” Dyan said, “it’s too bad the world isn’t shaped like a turd. A cylinder would be much easier to map than a sphere.”
“Ah, you misunderstand me again,” Eirig said. “That’s my fate, I guess. No, the world isn’t shaped like a human turd, you see. It’s a cowpat, a great big cowpat of a world, and we’re all on the underside of it, smashed against the ground.”
“Are there maps?” Jak asked. His eyes still glistened, but there was a hard fire behind them now.
Dyan shook her head. “I never saw any maps. The Cataclysm changed the face of the earth, we were told, so the old maps were pointless, and no one sent out from the System has ever returned with the information to produce a new one. I know place names, from pre-Cataclysm history, and I can tell you a little about where they are. Sayatil and Portolan should be west of here, for instance.” She considered. “Maybe those are the ruins the trader is talking about. They were supposed to be large cities. And somewhere away to the south was Satulak. But the country’s capital, back before the world broke, was in a place called Washatun, which was far away to the east.”
“On the other side of the Jawtooths,” Eirig said, “or my old dad would have mentioned it.”
“Much further than that,” she corrected him. “I think …” she tried to remember stories that might have any bearing on how far Washatun might be. The Cataclysm had so thoroughly changed things that most historians didn’t bother studying anything that happened before it. Or maybe they didn’t have the information. But she remembered legends of people in carts and wagons, coming to Satulak and Buza on foot over many months from Novoo and Chakag. And Washatun was much further away still. “I think maybe so far that it would take years of walking to reach it.”
“Years!” Jak whistled low. “How did they possibly control everyone?”
“Control?” Dyan was startled. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t you think that makes sense?” he asked. “Buza System controls everything in the Treasure Valley, and all the settlements around it. But as powerful as the System is, it couldn’t control something that was a year’s travel away.”
Dyan struggled for an answer. “Lots of things were different before the Cataclysm,” she said. “I think they traveled much faster. And even faster than travel was information sharing.”
Jak frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean … even though a messenger might take a year to cross the country, there were tools to send messages much faster. Maybe instantaneously.”
“That can’t be true,” Jak said. “Can it?”
“Sure.” Dyan didn’t know herself, of course, but she had read books and enjoyed lectures on history and folklore. “And they had weapons, things that could kill at a distance, even a great distance. They had weapons that caused explosions, and weapons that could melt buildings, and weapons that could kill a person at a great distance by penetrating him with a bit of metal.”
“Pistols,” Jak said. “Guns.”
Dyan was startled. Pistol was one of the words in the Gallows Song, and she hadn’t recognized it. She thought she’d heard it at Ratsnay Station, too. “What are pistols and guns?” she asked.
“There are ruins out by Ratsnay Station,” he told her. “Pre-Cataclysmic. Everyone knows they’re haunted. They call it Farkill, because the ghosts there can kill you at a distance. Everyone knows to stay away.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Pistols and Guns are the names of specters that kill people in the ruins. It isn’t safe to play with Guns, that’s what mothers in Ratsnay Station have been telling their children since … since forever. There are stories about how Guns bites children with his long metal tooth when they try to play with him, even from far away. Pistols is something similar. It isn’t safe to leave Pistols lying around, they say. You have to bury Pistols, the stories go, put him in a safe place, or he may bite you with his steel tooth.”
“Yeah,” said Eirig, “but that’s ghosts.”
“Is it?”
“Could it be?” Dyan asked. “Could Ratsnay Station be sitting on pre-Cataclysmic weapons and not know it?”
Ahead, a long wharf and a trading camp fast approached.
***
Chapter Twenty
“I don’t know why you care about Pistols and Guns,” Jak said, as they rode south out of the Shoshan trading camp.
Jak had haggled with the Shoshan barterers, a trio of solemn-faced old men with canny looks in their eyes and hair braided in long queues down their backs, for a saddle to replace the one they had lost at Narl’s and Aleena’s cabin. The Shoshan had never spoken a word that Dyan could understand, and had conducted the entire negotiation using gestures. Two colored blankets, one blue and one yellow, lay side by side across a heavy wooden table, and Jak and the Shoshan had made offers and counteroffers by placing objects on the blankets, the yellow holding the items Jak would surrender and the blue holding what the Shoshan were willing to give in exchange. The traders had shown no interest when Jak had offered one of the monofilament bolas, but had let shine through a glimpse of excitement when Outrider Lorne’s goggles had been offer
ed. Eventually, Jak had come away with a saddle, several waterskins full of water, strips of dried meat pounded with berries, and the blue blanket itself.
“I’m not sure I do,” Dyan countered thoughtfully.
They left the Shoshan and the Nemapi merchants haggling in silence over finished goods and rode south through crunchy yellow grass. Dyan rode behind Jak on Outrider Lorne’s horse, and Eirig rode alone on the Nemapi beast, which, when the two stood shoulder to shoulder, looked like a pony. Ahead of them, the hills bulked up, the broad valleys narrowed into canyons, and the Wahai proper began. The sun pounded down without mercy, and Dyan was sweating.
“You’re not really a killer,” Jak said.
“Neither are you.”
“Ah, but I am,” Eirig interjected. “Bloodthirsty as old Guns himself, they all say it.”
“I do what I have to do,” Jak defended himself. “And anyway, you’re plenty capable of slicing up man and beast with those monofilament weapons of yours without going chasing after ghost stories. Which is probably all it is.”
“Pulling his pistol, he shot her,” Dyan sang. “That doesn’t sound like a ghost.”
“It doesn’t sound like a pre-Cataclysmic weapon capable of making things explode, either. He shot her, that’s all the song says. Did he melt her? Cause her entire settlement to burn to the ground? It almost sounds polite, the way the song has it. Maybe he administered medicine.”
“But then they hang him.”
“Well … okay,” Jak conceded. “But you can’t give too much weight to old songs, especially when you don’t understand them.”
“I don’t really care about Pistols,” Dyan said. “But what if this ruin had other things? Information, for instance, about life before the Cataclysm? Or about the Cataclysm and what caused it?”
“I don’t care about the people who lived before the Cataclysm. I care about people who are alive,” Jak said. “Death is where I draw the line. You die, I stop caring about you.”
Dyan bit back words about Aleena, or about his father or Eirig’s, or about his friends who had been Culled. She stifled her own feelings, too, about Wayland and Aleena. She tried not to remember how it had felt to watch Outrider Lorne crumple to the ground dead, a complete stranger she had had to kill in order to survive, at whose death she had felt relief.
“What about maps?” Dyan asked. “What if the ruins of Farkill had a map that showed us the way to Satulak, or Sayatil, or Portolan?”
“More ruins,” Jak dismissed the suggestion.
“We don’t know that,” Dyan said. “No one knows that because, as far as I can tell, no one’s been to those places since the Cataclysm. At least, I’ve never heard of it, and no one will admit to knowing. And even if they are ruins, what if they’re still places where we can just be together, and not be followed by the System? Wouldn’t that be worth it?”
“Is there another girl in this picture?” Eirig asked. “Or do I get to play the heroic character of the fellow consoling himself with his one remaining hand for the rest of my life?”
“What are you talking about?” Jak turned beet red.
“Ah, don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m an idiot,” Eirig said. “Lucky for all of us, I’m not the jealous type.”
“Anyway,” Jak continued, trying to get off this subject, “I told you I’ve been into the ruins, and I didn’t see any maps.”
“Yeah?” Dyan asked. “How much of it did you explore? What were you looking for, and how did you look?”
“I wasn’t exploring,” Jak said. “I was proving I wasn’t a coward. I did what you have to do—I stayed the night with Guns and Pistols.”
“And did they bite you?” Dyan mocked him slightly.
“No,” he admitted. “But the wind was pretty fierce. Farkill is out in the flat middle of nowhere, and a lot of the walls are punched through, so bad weather just comes right on in.”
“And did you do this, too?” she asked Eirig.
He nodded. “I’m no coward.”
“So in other words,” Dyan summarized what she was hearing, “you hunkered down behind a wall and slept all night.”
“That doesn’t make me sound as heroic as I felt at the time,” Eirig said. “But it isn’t wrong.”
“I didn’t see any maps,” Jak admitted, “but maybe they’re there. It’s a big place, and Pistols and Guns could be keeping all kinds of secrets. Do you want to go look?” He pointed straight ahead down the canyon with his whole arm. “We could just ride south, straight through the Wahai and turn left. We could be back at Ratsnay Station in a couple of weeks. We’d have made a nice big circle.”
“Maybe I do,” Dyan said. “But right now I want to find a place to stop early and make camp. I’m exhausted.”
They followed a deer trail and found a box canyon, high above the floor of the main canyon at the top of a long sandy slope. They ate dried meat and drank water without a fire, and as the sun began to go down, Eirig loudly volunteered to stand the first watch. He took a field lens with him and disappeared.
Jak said nothing, but sat and held Dyan’s hand while they watched the stars come out together. Later, when he had fallen asleep, she covered them both with a microfiber blanket and lay awake, wondering what to do until Eirig stumbled back into camp, singing in a very loud voice.
In the morning, she taught Jak how to shoot with a bow. Once he had mastered basic posture and fingering and how to aim, she had him sink arrows into the trunks of a couple of old trees until nearly midday.
“This is fun,” Eirig commented as he chewed on his noon strip of meat and watched. “But it doesn’t seem as useful as the bola.”
“It’s much more useful,” Dyan disagreed. “You can hunt with the bow.”
“Oh, I’ve seen what one of those things can do to a horse,” Eirig said, pointing to the bolas that rode now on Dyan’s hips. “I expect it would do more or less the same thing to a deer, and the meat would be entirely edible. Besides, I can’t hunt with a bow.”
“You’ll never make your own bola in a pinch, though,” Jak pointed out. “Not that slices people in half, anyway. And if you mess up with the bow, you won’t take off your own limbs.”
“Aw,” Eirig grumbled. “Where’s the fun in it, then?”
“I’ll teach you to use the bola, too,” Dyan promised. “We have three of them, it would be good to share. Besides,” she looked at each of them playfully, “you’ll need something to defend yourselves against the mighty Pistols and Guns.”
Jak looked at Dyan with long and serious eyes, until she felt herself blushing and looked down. “Okay,” he agreed. “Back to Ratsnay Station it is.” With that agreement, it felt like their journey again acquired direction.
They rode several miles that evening, following the canyons south. Game was plentiful but water wasn’t always easy to come by, so they filled all their flasks and skins at every opportunity. As the sun set and the narrow canyon’s shadows became the darkness of night, Dyan rode around a bend in the path and saw they were not alone.
There were five of them, and they looked rough. Even if there had only been one or two, she would have been wary, but she definitely didn’t want to get into a fight with the odds against her. She had the reins of the horse, with Jak mounted behind her, but she let one hand drift down and rest on the bola at her hip.
They wore wool serapes, but not the colorful, bright weave of the Basku. Their outer garments were long and brown, the dirt and dust pounded into the wool only serving to make them even closer to the color of the canyon’s rock walls. They were all men, and unkempt. Ragged beards of various lengths fouled their jawlines, and hair that shimmered with grease spread across the backs of their necks. Two of them rode with spears in their stirrups, pointed at the sky. They all had swords or axes. Two lean dogs with patchy dark fur slunk along in the middle of the band.
It might have been her imagination, but Dyan imagined she could smell them as soon as she saw them, a hundred feet away. They sta
red back at her with expressions that suggested that they, in turn, found her repellent.
“This sort of makes me feel like we should have started with the bolas rather than the bow,” Eirig muttered.
Then Dyan realized that she was still dressed as an Outrider. She even still had Lorne’s badge pinned to her chest.
There was no time to back down now. She held her head high and took the bola from its holster, just in case. She held it in her left hand, discreetly invisible from the men as she urged her horse to pass them on the left, their rights. This would make it harder for them to draw weapons and attack her, she thought. Especially the spears.
The man in front spat on the ground, but didn’t draw a weapon. The others growled, frowned, or stared with beady eyes, but Dyan kept her head high and stared them down. The power that forced the men back was in her uniform, she realized, and not her own gaze. Still, she had to put on a good face, or even the uniform of the feared Outriders wouldn’t be enough. She wished she could Jak’s face, but he was fierce and she was sure he was giving stares as tough and menacing as he got. The two dogs snarled back at her, but they also held their attack.
She heard low grumbling as she passed the last of them, and then behind her she heard Eirig yelp, “Hey!”
She turned around. The last of the men had leaned over in the saddle and grabbed Eirig’s saddlebag. With his stump, Eirig struggled to stop the man from stealing their supplies, but without fingers there wasn’t much he could do.
Then the man drew a knife.
The dogs barked.
His knife was a long weapon, hooked forward and jagged-looking, with great scallops like bite marks in the blade side. He raised it—