The Puzzler's War

by Eyal Kless

  I knew the City of Towers had plenty of levels, neighbourhoods, and places which were desirable—some more than others—but everything worked properly everywhere. Here, it was obvious that the higher you lived, the better living conditions were. As I looked around, I wondered if this was due to human instinct or something to do with the erratic way the city functioned.

  We passed several ShieldGuards who were marching in formation. One of them turned his head, looking at our meagre cart, but they kept on marching.

  The voice of my contact, Sergiu the Dying, rang in my head.

  It is surprising, given your credentials, that you haven’t figured it out yourself by now.

  “Tell me, where does everyone get their weapons and gear from?” I asked Gret once I made sure the ShieldGuards were out of hearing range.

  “From them Nodes, of course.” Gret shook his head, as we turned a corner and made our way from the main road. “Really, Mistress, you said you lived here. Don’t you know? The City of Towers has several of ’em, spread around between the plateaus. Whenever the Nodes are opened, they find all kinds of helpful stuff in there.”

  These Nodes sounded like emergency sites installed by Tarakan Central Command. “So, you still get weapons and medicine from the emerg—from these Nodes?”

  “We?” Gret snorted in contempt. “We get nothing. When my Nura was sick and I needed medicine for her, the Menders had none for me, only for the top towers. Had to sell my good cart and Summer’s sister, Spring, to get her treated, and then borrow some more. It helped her a bit, but then the sickness came back, and . . .” He sighed.

  “The top towers control the Nodes?” I asked quickly as I saw Gret’s mood darken. I wanted to keep him talking. “How?”

  “They have them keys, Mistress, but you probably know nothing about them keys, don’t you?” Gret glanced at me. “The council have them three Puzzlers, each guarded by fifty ShieldGuards at all times. They are the only ones who can open the Nodes.”

  I heard Sergiu’s voice in my mind: Locate Emilija—she is a Puzzler.

  “Puzzlers?” I asked.

  “Yes, of the marked, you know, the tattooed.” Gret cracked his whip lightly above the mule’s back and spoke as we gained momentum. “They be like them Trolls, but with markings on their fingers.” He wiggled his own hand for emphasis. “But them are cursed in their mind, not their body. They say a Puzzler can see through your soul. If one of them even looks at you he can know what you think and lay a curse on you. That’s what happened in the Valley.”

  My mind was racing as Gret continued his little lecture.

  “When we had an outpost in the Tarakan Valley I used to transport goods, not onions. Better smell and less hassle, is what I say. Every time the Long Tube came from the Valley, me and the lads used to ship cartloads of everything you could imagine, and things you wouldn’t believe even if I told ya. Of course”—he smiled knowingly—“from time to time a few items fell from the back of those carts, but if you didn’t get greedy, no one minded too much because there was plenty for everyone. You could buy five of them food pills that keeps you going at the Tinker market for only two towers. Now it’s twenty towers if your hagglin’s good.”

  I nodded. What Gret described as “food pills” sounded like the nourishment pills, part of the emergency site’s system, meant to keep the population alive in case of a disaster. If the emergency site’s cell printers still manufactured them after all these years, that could mean some sort of command was being given from central to the bunker’s system. Among the information Gret was flooding me with, this was a piece of good news I could grasp and hold on to. On the other hand, the emergency site was also printing weapons. Now that was definitely not a part of any plans to help a civilian society in need that I knew of. Someone had added modern weapons to the roster of the printers, and it had been done after the war.

  I was contemplating that thought when I heard Gret mutter, “But the Puzzlers had enough and cursed us with the Lizards.”

  “What Lizards?”

  “You mean you haven’t seen them yet? Well, you wouldn’t, would you? They bring their dead bodies for the Menders, to make Skint to help the Trolls, but lately they’ve begun making the powder already in someplace closer to the Valley. It makes it better for transport when the Lizards are already powdered.”

  This just didn’t make sense at all, but before I could ask any more questions Gret declared, “Ah, here’s the place. My mind’s still metal.” He turned the cart into a narrow street. It ended in a small cul-de-sac with a surrounding wall decorated by a few statues. A quiet place where the rich lived peacefully.

  Gret brought the cart close the wall. “The stairs are on the other side, so you’ll have to stand on my shoulders,” he said as he jumped up to the cart’s roof.

  I nodded. There was no need to use my ESM, especially when a long climb awaited me. I shoved my hand into the coin satchel and grabbed a couple of coins.

  “Here, for your kindness and hospitality.”

  Gret looked offended. “Oh, no need, Mistress. You helped me with my home and bought Summer carrots and hay, that’s enough. Truth is, your company . . .” The gruff man suddenly blushed crimson. “It has been some time since I . . . you know . . . with me on the road half the time . . . and all those onions . . .”

  “Nonsense, Gret.” I shoved the coins into his hand. “You’ve had a rough couple of days, you need a good meal and a drink. On me.”

  Gret looked at the coins in his hand before pocketing them, nodding.

  “Come.” He looked around, then leaned his back against the wall and saddled his hands together for a leg up. “Let’s do this before those tower-head wannabes get curious.”

  A moment later I climbed from Gret’s palms to his shoulders and up to the wall. The stairs on the other side were not as far as the ground I’d just left but not a jump you wanted to miss. On both sides of the stairs was a very long drop to the ground below.

  I turned to Gret. “Thank you.”

  “Don’t let the tower-heads get ya.”

  His words raced after me as I jumped to the other side of the wall.

  Chapter 40

  Artium

  Entry 11693

  Typical summer season. The instruments showed 61.3 degrees midday with chilly downslope winds in the afternoon. The radiation storm has changed directions and passed thirty miles to our east. It has been three weeks since Emilija was brought to the SkyWatchers compound . . .

  Artium hesitated. He placed the cup gently above the fireplace and turned to watch the girl sitting by the screen. She had paused together with his sentence, her hands hovering above the keyboard, her eyes focused and unwavering. She did not turn her head towards him or even relax her body, but simply ceased all movement and waited for him to continue.

  He had to admit, the girl was strange, but not in a frightening way. She never complained, no matter what he asked of her. A few days ago, in a moment of frustration, he told her to type his words for him. He stood next to her as she sat for the first time in front of the screen, or at least that was what he thought at the time. Now he was getting suspicious that the girl’s hesitation was only an act. The machine was older than Artium, even older than the Catastrophe. The numbers and letters had to be manually typed on a physical keyboard. Artium remembered the months it took him to master it and gain any kind of speed. By the third page, Emilija was typing at the speed of speech. If she did not know a word she would ask but otherwise not one word or letter was wrong. When Artium asked Emilija about it she just said, “The pattern is simple,” as if that explained everything.

  Now that the process of dictation seemed so easy and natural, Artium found himself dictating his personal logs as well. Emilija just kept typing without any reaction to anything he said, even when he talked about her or the conversation he’d had with her foster parents.

  On a personal note:

  Emilija resumed typing. A baby owl chick landed on her shoulder, bu
t she ignored it completely.

  Emilija has rearranged the living and working area and I am content that it is much better now.

  It was true. The girl knew how to clean all right, but the way she rearranged things was uncanny. Every day she went to another room and by the time she was done it was . . . well . . . perfect. Suddenly there was more space, and his tools were within arm’s reach and Artium stopped hitting the corner of the table every time he walked past it. Again, in response to his praises she would just utter, “The pattern is better this way,” like it was some kind of an obvious explanation.

  To my request, Emilija trimmed my beard and cut her hair. The outcome was—

  Artium paused and glanced at the poor girl.

  —satisfactory.

  Now that was a complete disaster. He had simply commented on the volume of her disarrayed hair and the risk of lice. The next thing he knew Emilija had found a hunting knife and gone to work, tying each lock of tangled hair in a braid, then cutting it away with the blade in several uncharacteristic decisive movements. The outcome was . . . she now looked like a badly potted plant. But when he spotted the tattoos on her skull he stopped himself from ordering her to shave her hair off completely. Instead, he used the time when she was sitting at the machine and he was standing above her to get a closer look at them. Like the markings on her fingers and arm, the tattoos were geometrical patterns and not natural skin deformations. He wondered if they had anything to do with the girl’s behaviour. Artium had heard rumours about the marked, and that they possessed superhuman powers, but he’d never believed any of it. Emilija seemed ordinary enough, certainly not stronger or faster than any other female he’d encountered, though Artium would have been the first to admit that he’d encountered very few females in his life. Still, as far as he could tell, her powers consisted of knowing where to put things and establishing surprisingly good relationships with the owls and goats, even with mean Dean, who Artium had spotted happily eating out of her hand the other day. He did not understand what the fuss was about. Maybe the girl’s oddness came from the fact that she was raised in a barn with no one to talk to. It was sad, really. The girl had sturdiness in her frame, but was certainly pretty enough to gain a husband.

  “I think I will continue on my own from here,” he said abruptly, blushing for no reason.

  Emilija simply stood up, without question or argument, and waited for his orders. He suddenly felt tired and simply wanted to sit by himself and light his pipe with dried Urga grass.

  “It has been a long day, maybe I’ll put a fresh log on the fire and—”

  “I’ve already put one in, Master SkyWatcher.” There was no emotion in the girl’s voice. She simply relayed the fact that his wishes had been anticipated and cared for in advance.

  Artium turned, but the fireplace was too far away and too blurry for him to see clearly.

  “Ah, good, well. You can use the shower before you—do not take off your clothes here.”

  Emilija dropped her hands obediently and her dress fell back to her hips.

  Artium shook his head. “Take your clothes off in the shower room, use the shower, and dress immediately after you finish.”

  Emilija turned and walked to the door, and Artium noted to himself that despite the slowness of her movements, they were efficient. When Emilija passed him she stopped suddenly and turned.

  “The pattern in your eyes is wrong.”

  Artium tried to figure out what she meant by that.

  “Why can’t you see?” It was the first direct question the girl had asked since arriving at the compound, and it caught Artium by surprise.

  “I am going blind, my dear,” he said kindly.

  “Why?” This time she was focusing her empty stare on him and Artium almost wished she wasn’t.

  “Because I am growing old.”

  “Why are you growing old?”

  “That’s . . . that is just the way of things. We all grow old and eventually die. When it is our time,” he added hastily, the image of the gun suddenly flashing before his eyes.

  “I will not grow old,” Emilija said with absolute certainty.

  Artium sighed. What was the use of explaining the facts of life to a young woman who was ready to shed her clothes just because he told her to shower? “We all grow old—but don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time before that happens.”

  “I will not grow old. I will die soon.”

  The certainty of her tone at such an ominous prediction caused a shudder in Artium. “There is no need to talk like that.” He tried to sound resolute. “You are young and have many years before you.”

  The girl shook her head. “No. I will die. Someone will come and take me away.”

  “I am sure your mother will come soon, but she is definitely not going to kill you.”

  “No. It is not my mother. It is someone else. Someone with a strange pattern will come for me, take me away, and then I will die.”

  The way she coolly informed him of this was almost infuriating, really. “Oh, and how do you know that, young lady?”

  “I have seen it.”

  “Emilija. No matter what you have been told, no one can predict the future. This machine here was built before the Catastrophe and even it could barely predict next week’s weather.” He chuckled at his own joke, despite the oddness of the situation.

  “Tomorrow will be cooler than usual. With northern slope winds coming in around noon, lowering the temperature to fifty-four point six—”

  “How do you know that?” He had been letting the girl type his words, but he certainly had not given her permission to access that part of the machine. That was protected by a twenty-letters-long security code.

  Emilija turned her head back from where she sat. “The machine told me.”

  “Yes, but how did it tell you?” She was probably just rephrasing his sentences.

  For a brief moment, Emilija betrayed emotion, and it was confusion. As if she was being asked to explain the obvious.

  “The machine told me,” she repeated, nodding to herself. “It is old, but it does not die, and it needs a shower. It asked me to clean it. Then it will feel better.”

  The machine worked. That was all Artium knew. It was older than Artium, older than the Catastrophe, and somehow it had survived strife and time. By SkyWatcher’s law, you did not mess with the machine. Whatever ideas this crazy girl had, she needed to be stopped.

  “Emilija.” He used his sternest tone. “I forbid you from using the machine, touching the keyboard, trying to clean it, or doing anything to it, understand?”

  Someone else might have argued. Emilija just looked at him and said, “You are blind.”

  “Why does that have anything to do with it?”

  “You cannot see.”

  “Yes. I know I am going blind, that is why I need a stupid girl like you to walk around the place, asking stupid questions and moving things about. I have changed my mind, do not take a shower, just go to your quarters now and stay there without touching anything until tomorrow.”

  Nothing changed in Emilija’s demeanour. She simply turned and left through the door, closing it softly behind her.

  Artium found his reclining chair and sat on it with a heavy sigh. He was sorry for his outburst as soon as he’d uttered the words, but the girl was a pain. He realised now why Reya, her foster mother, was so eager to leave her behind. Artium fished out his pipe with one hand and the bag of leaves with the other. He reminded himself to collect leaves one more time before winter hit, or he’d get stuck without. Somehow, he knew that the village would not be sending him any.

  Artium stuffed and lit his pipe, felt the smoke fill his mouth and his body relax. Regret filled his heart. He had actually planned on telling the girl to stay in the compound tonight—certainly there were plenty of rooms about and rules be damned—but now she was going to be climbing in the dark all the way up to the observatory, and he had told her to “touch nothing.” Artium shook his head an
d puffed smoke. He had a terrible feeling that Emilija took his words literally.

  Oh well. It was too late to run after her now, and exercise was never a bad thing, for the young. If the girl was stupid enough to stand in the observatory all night, touching nothing, that was certainly not his fault.

  The pipe emptied and he placed it carefully on the small table that was situated conveniently near the reclining chair. Ingrid, Fred, and the chicks hooted softly from above. He closed his eyes and told himself he should go to bed, and that was how he fell asleep.

  Chapter 41

  Mannes

  Mannes stopped, leaned on his ski poles, and caught his breath. It wasn’t just the steep climb, knee-deep in snow; the mask and air filters made each breath laborious, and the pain in his knees told him he would have to replace them soon. On top of that, he was just too old for this shit. Definitely way too old.

  Tygrynkeev, his Chukchi guide, kept climbing ahead until the long rope between them began to tighten. He stopped, turned, walked back down, and took Mannes by the elbow.

  “We must hurry, Chief.” His speech was so muffled behind the hazard mask, it was barely audible. “This is no place to stay for long.”

  Mannes nodded and let himself be helped up the hill. He only had two working hazard suits, so his troops had to be left behind and there was no reason to keep up the pretence he was beyond fatigue or indestructible. Even with these rumours, which he helped circulate among his forces, morale had plummeted in the past few months and desertions had almost halved his force.

  A few officers risked their lives and tried to persuade him to turn back. “There is nothing to conquer here,” they had said, stating the obvious, and they were right. There was no loot, no oil or power supplies, no food. The Geiger counter was detecting increasing radiation with every mile they travelled northeast through this frozen wilderness. Still he pushed on. He had to get there. He had to see this for himself.