by Joe McKinney
“I’m sure.” Bray turned and pointed at Wanderer’s peak. “If we try to make it to the peak we won’t get there until well after midnight. Travelling through the forest at night is not wise. If we spend the night here, we’ll be safe.”
Ella stared into the debris. “Or you’ll murder us and leave our bodies inside the room.”
Bray laughed loudly again. “Why would I need to murder you down there and foul a perfectly good hideout with your corpses? Wouldn’t I have been better off to let the monsters kill you by the river?”
Ella looked down into the hole and gasped. While her and Bray were talking, William had climbed down and cracked the door. He was peeking behind the debris into a dark hole in the side of the rectangle. “William. Get back here. Now!”
William looked back up, smiled, and slipped out of sight.
“No.” Ella looked left and right at the walls of the big square hole, looking for an obvious way down.
Bray jumped into the hole, rolled to the ground and bounced back up to his feet. He pointed at the thick wall of vines. “Climb down there.”
Looking at the depth of the hole, Ella knew she’d break an ankle if she jumped. She ran around to the other side of the hole and scrambled down the wall, scratching herself and tearing her dress on the way.
Once her feet hit solid ground, she turned to see Bray squeezing through the opened door, which was hidden behind some kind of fallen support beam. It seemed to be going into the earth. “Bray?”
He didn’t turn around.
She bounded across the small space and squeezed behind the support beam and through the door. “William? William?”
Inside the dark room, she smelled smoke and ashes. Once her eyes adjusted, she saw Bray’s silhouette.
“William’s here,” Bray said. “He’s fine.”
She shuffled forward though she could barely make out the floor. When she reached William, she grasped his shoulder and turned him around. “What were you thinking?”
He looked up at her with a question on his shadowed face. “What?”
“What are you doing running off without me?”
He shook his head. “I was exploring.”
Calming her frantic breathing she said, “Don’t do that. You can’t explore when you’re outside the circle wall. Demons could’ve been in here. You could’ve—”
“What?” William asked. “There are no demons in here.”
Bray was looking around in the semi-darkness. “He’s right. They don’t come down here.”
“You can’t know that,” Ella told William.
“I know,” William replied.
Ella shook her head and drew an exasperated breath as she took in the darkened room. Through the faint light from the doorway, she could make out the cracks in the walls. The room was larger then her house back in Brighton and full of debris. “How could you know demons weren’t down here?”
William pointed out through the door they’d come through. “Nothing on the ground outside was disturbed. No tracks, no broken twigs. Even the autumn leaves weren’t crunched like they’d been stepped on.”
“He’s right about that,” said Bray.
Ella laughed and ran her hand through William’s hair. “A day and a half in the wild and now you’re a tracker.”
William’s face turned serious as he shook his head. “I notice things, Mom. I’m a kid, but I notice things.”
“You don’t even know what demon footprints look like.” Ella bent over to bring her face level with William’s. “How would you know the difference between a demon foot print and a person’s footprint? How could you know that the demons hadn’t been careful when they snuck in so they could ambush the next person who came through the door?”
William pushed his mom’s hand off his head. “I saw their tracks in the forest yesterday and today. You didn’t notice them, but I did.”
Ella looked worriedly up at Bray, as though he might say something to prove William’s words untrue. She said, “William, how come you didn’t say anything to me?”
“You were already frightened,” he answered. “I didn’t want to scare you anymore. I wanted to protect you.”
Ella engulfed the boy in a hug and sniffled. “It’s my job to protect you, honey.”
Bray moved away from them. “I’ll start a fire. It may get cold tonight.” He shuffled through the scraps of wood and other things on the floor, collecting what looked like it might burn.
Ella let go of William.
William said, “I learned about the tracks as we were walking through the forest.”
“Just by walking through the forest?” Ella wasn’t sure whether to believe William or not.
He shrugged. “There wasn’t anything else to do so I paid attention. I learned that the twisted men don’t wear shoes. Not like us.”
“That’s true,” Bray added.
“Okay,” Ella conceded. She recalled the demons they’d encountered at the river. They’d all been barefoot.
“And,” William said, “They don’t try to hide. They move like predators through the forest. They don’t need to disguise their tracks.”
“True again,” Bray said. “They don’t fear anything in the forest.”
Shaking her head, Ella asked William, “And you learned this all by yourself? Just from looking at their tracks?”
“Yes, Mom,” William answered. “It’s easy. All you have to do is pay attention.”
“Why don’t we get some sleep,” Bray interrupted them. “The demons are more active at night. Whether they come down here or not, we don’t want to alert them.”
Ella nodded. She stared back into the darkness for William, but he had already crouched down and begun opening his pack.
Chapter 19
Minister Beck
The soft pale stones of Brighton’s plaza seemed to drink in the stench of ash and burned flesh. For weeks after a Cleansing, the air leached the smells back out of the rocks and tormented passersby with the memories of that day. For that reason, Beck made a habit of avoiding the square for a fortnight after a Cleansing. He didn’t even enter the square on market days, when the farmers brought their produce in from the fields to sell.
Unfortunately, circumstances required Beck to now pass through the plaza just two days after the Cleansing. In the middle of the day with the sun heating its flat stones, it reeked of death, both burned and rotting. The smell brought to mind too many acrid, clingy memories—images and sounds Beck tried hard to forget.
So much unnecessary suffering.
Such dogmatic adherence to stories passed by word of mouth, stories passed from one generation of illiterate holy men to the next generation of novices. And so it went.
Beck never understood the faith that Father Winthrop’s imbecilic lot put in a collection of unwritten stories. Perhaps they’d been true when they’d first been whispered into a zealot’s ear so many generations ago, but they’d likely morphed, whether through faded memory, translation, or malicious choice.
Any child burned by gossip the first time knew that to be true.
When Beck had raised the point to Winthrop, the Bishop had indignantly explained that the Holy Words of God were meant to be fluid. Winthrop said that God revealed to men only as much of his plan as men needed to hear, and that changes in the Words from one generation to the next were part of God’s mechanism for parsing out the light of his wisdom in portions that men were able to consume. How dare Beck imply that anything else might be occurring?
The best part of it all was that Father Winthrop seemed to have been inventing the explanation on the fly, as if his mere assertion of the theory made it part of the holy verbal canon.
How ironically imperfect religion was. The holy men were never wrong.
Beck rolled his eyes and glanced to his right. Scholar Evan, his apprentice, had fallen behind. Evan was paying too much attention to the long the row of spikes that lined the plaza. Each spike was a sharpened pole that stood several feet t
aller than a man. The spikes were topped with the heads of Ella Barrow’s friends and acquaintances.
And Blackthorn wasn’t finished yet.
According to the census, the last of Ella’s relations, her aunt and uncle, lived in Davenport, a small frontier village on the banks of a wide river.
“Are you well, Evan?” Beck asked.
“Yes, Minister. I am troubled. My troubles slow my feet.”
“Fresh heads on spikes trouble you?” Beck chastised himself silently. He hadn’t meant to say it harshly. Not that Evan would notice. Evan had a blind spot for social nuance. His mind was narrowly tuned to his intellectual interests, focused on his numbers.
Evan stopped and turned to look at the head of a spiked boy they were passing.
Beck halted to wait.
Evan took a step closer to the pole, entranced by the agony-twisted face, the evidence of an unclean neck cut. Cords of flesh and tendon dangled out of the throat and swayed with the breeze, and several chunks of flesh stuck to the spike.
For a moment, Beck wondered if Evan was going to reach up and touch the boy’s face.
Instead, Evan said, “I’m not troubled, except to think that the number of dead is unnecessarily large. Do you know how many villages lie outside the three towns?”
“Twenty-seven,” Beck answered.
“Yes, twenty-seven named villages.”
“Named?” Beck asked.
“Small, unsanctioned settlements exist on the frontier,” said Evan. “Some even exist between the villages closer in to Brighton. Sometimes they are but a single brave family living for themselves. Others are several families, a dozen or two people.” Evan gestured at the long row of heads on the spikes. It looked like he was counting them. After a pause, he said, “Fifty-three.”
Beck didn’t need to be reminded of the number. He’d been required to be there to count the condemned. He’d watched as Blackthorn’s men severed the necks of the screaming men, women, and children. He watched as the soldiers jammed the bleeding heads on spikes, while he bit back his anger over the pointless brutality.
It was another in a long line of episodes that reinforced Beck’s belief that the wrong men were ruling the three towns. Governance, he believed should be in the hands of learned, thinking men, not hypocritical zealots and generals.
Evan asked, “Do you know what the average birth rate is in the three towns and the villages?”
“Three.” Beck answered, raising a hand. “We’ve talked through the complexities of this before so spare me another walk through the details. Can we simply skip to the point you want to get at?”
Evan waved at the line of heads. “Instead of spiking these people, they should have been banished to build a new frontier village. If they survived, in two generations, there’d be two hundred of them, and in four generations, a hundred years from now, it would be larger than any of today’s villages.”
“If you are trying to construct an argument that would sway General Blackthorn away from spiking people, then you need to understand something. Just as babbling hokum is Father Winthrop’s faith, brute force is General Blackthorn’s. Neither will be swayed by logic garnered through mathematical methods they do not understand.”
Evan’s frustration was written on his face. “Could it be explained to Minister Blackthorn that there will come a time when the demon horde returns?”
Beck laughed out loud. “Every child in the three towns knows the stories of the demon hordes that used to sweep out of the ancient city. Those hordes used to come once or twice a generation. We’ve been lucky to have peace for the last forty years and our people have prospered.”
“But Minister Beck, we have no reason to believe that the demons have gone forever.”
“No, of course not.” Beck furrowed his brow. “Spasksy’s Blue Shirts hunt them down in the forests. I venture to guess that they kill several hundred per year.”
Evan shook his head. “One thousand, eight hundred and thirty six, on average.”
Surprised, Beck searched Evan for some sign of deception. “You collect counts of the number of demons killed each year?”
Evan nodded.
“Why?” Beck asked.
“In death, their numbers have value.”
“How so?” Beck asked.
“The number of demons killed goes up nearly every year. Ten years ago, when I started the census, the number was only a few hundred. Now—” Evan raised his eyebrows.
Beck shook his head. “I’ve seen Blackthorn’s men train. He is a tyrant, but he is a superb general. Perhaps his men excel at exterminating them, and are improving each year.”
“I subscribe to an alternative explanation.”
“Which is?” Beck asked.
Evan paused. “I believe the population of demons increases each year, even though we see relatively few.”
“And where are these demons hiding?” Beck asked.
“Perhaps the forest.” Evan said, “Until they mass and fall on us like the grasshopper plague. The phenomena are not altogether different. Grasshoppers are always here, and we pay them little mind. But once a decade, they mass into black clouds, rolling over our fields and eating every crop to the nub.”
“You think the demons are like grasshoppers?” Beck wondered why he tolerated Evan sometimes. He could be as irritating as he was brilliant.
“Yes,” Evan answered. “I think a horde of demons is growing out there in the forests and in the ancient city. One day it will return and destroy our frontier villages or more.”
Beck shrugged. It didn’t matter that Evan bolstered his demon fear with his census numbers. There were few people in the townships that didn’t nurture that same fear. “What is the point of this discussion?”
“A little more patience, please.” Evan said. “Do you know how many people died when the last great demon army swept across the villages?”
Beck shook his head. “I doubt anyone does.”
“I’ve studied the question.”
Beck laughed. “How could you study something that happened before our census even existed?”
“I have talked to the old men and women who lived back then. I have asked them about the villages that were razed, and about how large those villages were. I asked about the attacks. I asked about the army. I spent a great deal of time on this analysis, Minister Beck, and I believe my numbers are correct.”
Beck frowned. Evan was meticulous, even though his methods were unconventional.
Evan said, “I believe that nearly eight thousand people died.”
“That number seems high,” said Beck.
“I am confident in the number. What I found more disturbing was the death toll in proportion to the population at the time.”
“How could you know the population?” Beck asked. Surely, there were limits to what a man could deduce with numbers and questions.
“But from the census, I have learned the birth rate,” said Evan. “Using our current population and the current birth rate, which has been stable since I started the census, I was able to work backwards through the math to calculate the population forty years ago.”
Beck was taken aback. It made perfect sense. Perhaps Evan was a genius. “I didn’t know that could be done.”
“I assure you, it can,” said Evan.
“How many people were there at the time?”
“Twenty-five thousand.”
“One in three died?” Beck’s doubts started to rise. “On the last census, you told me there were nearly fifty thousand people in the townships and villages.”
“I did. The math predicts the number except for a discrepancy.”
Beck smirked. “Your math was wrong?”
“I thought so at first.” Evan smiled.
“Please, get to the point.”
Evan gestured at the heads on the spike. “If you count all of the people that General Blackthorn spiked for their offenses, calculate the number of their children, and now their children, you w
ill find the discrepancy.”
Beck sighed. “How large of a discrepancy are we talking about?”
“Thirteen thousand.”
That number surprised Beck. “He put thirteen thousand people to the spike?”
Evan shook his head. “Not directly, but that’s how many fewer humans are alive today because of Blackthorn and his spike. Spiked people can’t reproduce, and non-existent children can’t have children.”
Beck frowned at the cost of Blackthorn’s brutality.
“My fear is that when the horde comes again there may not be enough of us to survive the attacks and we will go the way of the Ancients.”
Beck started to walk. They crossed half the plaza in silence when Beck said, “Perhaps General Blackthorn is worse for Brighton than even I suspected.”
Evan stopped and slowly shook his head. “This long-term effect of spiking is bad, but—”
Beck waited for the rest of the sentence. “Speak.”
With reluctance, Evan said, “I have been tracking other numbers.”
“Yes?” Beck asked.
“The spiking is not the worst problem we face. There is another. If my data is correct, demons or not, we are all going to die.”
Chapter 20
Ella
The sky was a tangle of crimsons and oranges when Ella, William, and Bray reached the base of Wanderer’s peak. After a full day of hiking, the three travelers had fallen into a rhythm—Bray in the lead, Ella and William tight behind him, as if they’d practiced the formation for weeks. It’d been half an afternoon since their last stop and Ella’s legs were sore, but she knew they needed to press on.
The dying light was like a fourth companion, keeping them on track and pushing them along.
For most of the afternoon, they’d been unable to see the mountain through the thick forest, but now that Ella had a clear view, the sight was breathtaking. She stared up the steep slope. The side was flecked with trees, but about halfway up, the landscape gave way to stone and shrubs. The mountain’s peak seemed miles away, and she was reminded of some of the stories the townspeople told of the ruins—buildings whose tops seemed to extend into the heavens.