Sired by Stone

by Andrew Post

  In the shade, he cut off the engine, vibrations echoing in his hands. He peeled off his gloves, dusty goggles, and the bandanna mask to let the arid breeze touch his alabaster skin.

  “This can’t possibly be it.”

  Clyde turned—as much as he could, buckled in as he was—and found Rohm’s fiberglass terrarium in the passenger seat coated in layers of dust. “Well, you’re the navigator,” Clyde said.

  Popping open the lid, the frisk mouse inside was poised over the gadget by which they’d been finding their way. “I believe if we start heading more westward, we’ll—” Rohm broke off when looking up at Clyde. “My, aren’t we a fright?”

  Clyde adjusted the rearview mirror. His hair was standing up in every direction. Nevele had been begging him to cut it, preferring his pompadour, but this was another attempt at blending with Geyser’s regular citizens—or normaloids, as Nevele sometimes called them, the unwoven. His parchment-white skin and obsidian eyes were things he couldn’t help, but letting his jetty hair grow to jaw length like the other men did help him feel slightly more normal—if there was such a thing.

  He mashed down the raven mass. “Better?”

  Rohm nodded. “Much.”

  Outside their temporary resting place, Clyde squinted at the suns-scorched landscape and the occasional cactus patch in the bleary heat waves. Even though the Lakebed was absent of grave markers, Clyde couldn’t help but think of cemeteries. So quiet.

  “So where are we?”

  “It keeps changing,” Rohm said.

  “Changing?”

  The frisk mouse used his entire hand to press the navigational buttons. “Yes, the stupid thing’s confused. I told you we should’ve just brought a compass. Unlike technology, the magnetosphere doesn’t lie.”

  Rohm slammed a tiny pink fist on the device’s screen, latitude and longitude becoming a plane of squiggles. It corrected but still showed them to be—as far as the device was concerned—hopelessly lost, bouncing their dot from here to there as if they were erratically teleporting about the desert.

  “Could I try?” Clyde reached into the terrarium.

  Rohm slapped him away. Well, more like patted, it being such a small hand.

  “Fine, fine,” Clyde said. “I’m the driver and you’re the navigator. Apologies.”

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  Clyde had noticed in the intervening year, Rohm had grown somewhat acerbic. When he and all his brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins had been together, a sort of neutral amicability had been their standard. But this single member of the Rodents of Hive Mind was all that remained, the entire bloodline of hyperintelligent frisk mice snuffed by Vidurkis Mallencroix. Clyde couldn’t much blame him for the bitterness. Whereas Clyde had lost his parents and Mr. Wilkshire—and his siblings, wherever they were—Rohm had lost hundreds of immediate family members, right before his eyes.

  “Damn it all.” Rohm kicked the device across the terrarium, leaving it where it sank halfway into his water bowl. He hopped onto his “intelligence-insulting” running wheel and to the rim of the terrarium, scampered up Clyde’s jacket sleeve, and perched on his shoulder. Bracing himself on Clyde’s eyebrow, Rohm gazed into the stretching nothingness.

  “Glad to provide a lookout tower,” Clyde said, trying to estimate where Rohm was looking.

  “Nessapolis is that way.” Rohm dragged out each word, giving Clyde no confidence. “I say we head that way and just keep our fingers crossed.”

  “You’re the boss.” Clyde started the buggy again. “Okay, back in you go,” he said, bobbing his head to the side to drop Rohm into his terrarium.

  The mouse hung on, swinging by Clyde’s earlobe. “I should stay out here with you. You might get us lost again.”

  Clyde adjusted the mirror to address Rohm, now on his shoulder. “Me? I’m the driver.”

  “Fine, all right, but let me make up for my choice of faulty navigational equipment by remaining out here, where I can keep sight on what I assume—and hope—is the right direction; attempt to utilize the natural sense of direction mice are said to have.”

  Reluctantly, Clyde agreed, waited long enough for Rohm to find purchase among the stitches of his poncho, the one Nevele had made for him, before throwing the buggy into reverse. Sand kicked out ahead of them, almost burying the lean-to.

  After squaring up the buggy’s grille facing the way Rohm pointed, they tore off, engine bellowing.

  And for a while, it’s all he could hear—until one sound did cut through.

  Clyde kept them moving, glancing at the side mirrors, seeing nothing.

  Again. A heavy, breathy pop, like . . .

  A harpoon impaled the passenger seat, scattering shards of broken terrarium. If Rohm had been inside . . .

  Keeping on the accelerator, Clyde ducked in the seat. Not that there was any protection in doing so—the buggy had no doors. It was just a cage of metal bars holding the tires, seats, and engine together.

  Clyde twisted around to get a peek at their pursuers. Partly masked in a dust cloud, the second buggy kept time with no trouble as if deliberately drawing out the chase, relishing it.

  Rohm in his ear: “Look out!”

  Ahead, a cactus patch was ready to embrace them with bristling green paws.

  Clyde flung the wheel to the left. Barbs scraped down the side of the buggy, a near miss. But the sharp dodge made them lose traction on the slippery sand. The horizon began to tilt. Acting on instinct, Clyde steered into the flip. For a terrifying moment the vehicle, on two wheels, weighed the pros and cons of rolling. Thankfully, it favored returning to all four wheels. The sudden traction made Clyde’s head thump the seat back.

  Another harpoon sailed over them—sickeningly close.

  Clyde fought the wheel. The back end swung out, and he caught a better look at their pursuers’ vehicle—twice as big as the buggy, spiked front end, pockmarked steel windshield, monster face on wheels—while the buggy turned a full three-sixty.

  Clyde mashed the gas again, but the wheels dug graves for themselves. Something under the bonnet cried. The engine sputtered, fell silent.

  Their kicked-up sandstorm drifted over, the entire world yellow.

  Coughing, blind, Clyde twisted the ignition again and again. “Come on . . .”

  The second vehicle’s engine noise built to a hellish crescendo.

  “What’re they doing?” Rohm squeaked.

  Clyde kept trying the ignition. Dead clicks.

  A wall of spikes plunged through the swirling sandy murk.

  Slapping a hand to pin Rohm against his shoulder, Clyde released his seat straps and threw himself out the other side.

  A bone-powdering clash: landing on its grille in the distance, the buggy bounced, spinning and throwing sand as it returned to the air, twisting and flopping. When it landed again, it lay still on its side, hemorrhaging petrol onto the dirt and smoke into the air.

  Their pursuers’ vehicle didn’t even suffer so much as a nick. Clyde confirmed this, lying breathless with the grille mere inches from his face.

  “Run,” Rohm advised. “Run.”

  Clyde scrambled to his feet and backpedaled as the vehicle’s doors fell open and four men emerged. All four wore bandanna masks and dark-tinted goggles and brandished weapons—swords, a pistol, and a rifle.

  Marching toward him, they uttered nothing. Not a cheer, no self-congratulatory whoop of having won the chase. This was a bandit’s day at the office. Work.

  Clyde took a few strides before he realized how pointless it was. They were in the Lakebed—there was nowhere to hide.

  He set his sights on his buggy, willed his legs to pump, fright making every bone feel like gelatin.

  A shot rang out, puffing sand near his boots.

  Using their wrecked auto as temporary shelter, he found the trunk’s latch broken. Squeezing fingers under, he leaned back to drag the trunk door open with his unsubstantial weight. It popped free, supplies raining out. Clyde swatted
aside the tent, blankets, a bundle of overpriced firewood, and the cooler box loaded with Rohm’s cheese.

  For a moment, he panicked. It’s gone.

  “Mr. Clyde, they’re coming.”

  The bandits, clearly used to this terrain, were graceful on the sand. Another shot, this one sparking near Clyde’s fumbling hands.

  Then he saw it: Commencement, in its sheath, wedged in the bottom. The trunk had been misshapen during the crash and now hugged the sword at either end, greedily pinching it. Wrenching, snarling with the effort, Clyde fell back clumsily when the green sword finally popped free.

  Turning on his heel, he sent the sheath aside, the blade singing its liberation.

  He held Commencement as taught, recalling the lessons he’d been taking back home from the same man who’d turned the royal revolver into an emerald metal blade: Grigori Gonn, Geyser’s most seasoned blacksmith. “It’s a dead art, swordplay,” the gruff old man had said, rolling his shoulders at the start of their first lesson, “but if you’re payin’ and got the willin’ to learn, I’ll teach ya all the same.”

  The bandits spread themselves wide. Clyde kept hopping back, spinning one way and then the other, fighting to keep them all in front of his goggles at once.

  From his left came the telltale click-clack of a rifle bolt. “Ain’t you never heard the sayin’ ’bout bringin’ a knife to a gunfight, boy?”

  “I have, and it would apply if this were just a knife.”

  From the radio clipped to his hip—at quite possibly the worst time—Nevele called out, “Come in, come in. We need to talk, like, immediately.”

  “Who that—yer momma?” the rifleman said. “Wanna give her a ring back, tell ’er yer busy with yer new friends?”

  Misdirection, Grigori Gonn said, was paramount in a fight. While the rifleman was teasing Clyde, a shadow on the ground eclipsed his own. He spun, raised Commencement, and locked onto a curved sword with a crash.

  The bandit’s face was close, his breath sour with rot. “Shoot, I got ’im.”

  Rohm, his second set of eyes: “Move!”

  Clyde pistoned his boot to push himself away.

  A shot shattered the dusty air. The bullet connected—fwap.

  A sword plopped into the sand, then a set of knees. The bandit bled freely from the hole in his chest, dropped the rest of the way into the grit, and lay still.

  “Damn it, Lou,” the rifleman groaned, advancing the next round.

  Clyde turned to survey the remaining three. One wielding a sword, the apparent ringmaster raising a rifle, and one rattling an antique handgun in an unsteady hand.

  From his belt: “Clyde. Come in. I’m getting in line to head home. I won’t be able to call you once I’m onboard. Clyde? Are you okay?”

  The leader squeezed the rifle stock to his shoulder but lowered it. His expression was impossible to discern behind the mask, but the pause spoke volumes.

  “What? What is it?” the shaky one said.

  When Clyde glanced behind him, the second swordsman was charging toward their buggy. “Go. Let’s go,” he shouted as he ran. “Forget ’im, Emer. Let’s get

  outta here!”

  The rifleman—Emer, apparently—remained staring at Clyde for a long moment. “Lemme see yer face. Ain’t no way you—if you is you—would be way out here.”

  Clyde, confused, didn’t move.

  He raised the rifle again. “Yer face. Now!”

  Clyde didn’t bother throwing back his hood or pulling down his bandanna, just lifted his goggles, his dark eyes and snowy complexion on display.

  The rifleman blanched. His aim drifted, and he began backing away, free hand raised. “We ain’t done nothin’ to ya. Yer fine. Ain’t even hurt none. Juss don’t . . . eht my soul, awright?”

  The rifleman pointed at the bandit with the pistol, whose knees were now knocking. “Eht his. Yeah, here.” And without hesitation, he fired upon him, striking him above the knee.

  The shaking bandit shrieked, crumpled, clutching his leg.

  Deed done, his own safety secured, the rifleman ran for the buggy. The swordsman that’d already bolted slowed long enough to let the second man on.

  In short time, the buggy receded into the wind-tossed Lakebed, the roar of its overworked engine fading.

  Clyde’s pulse rang in his ears, his limbs heavy.

  “Please, please don’t eht my soul,” the man on the ground begged, voice cracking, drawing Clyde’s attention.

  The sandy earth drank his blood, each drop burrowing as if being chased underground. He’d peeled off his mask. Clyde was stunned. He was no more than a boy. Certainly tall for his age but with a face that wouldn’t look out of place on someone half his height. Tears flowed down full cheeks as blood squeezed out between his glove’s fingers in thin, steady streams—the wound was tenacious. “Please don’t eht my soul. Please.”

  Clyde had no idea how he, the Sequestered Son no longer a myth, had been treated in the news outside of Geyser. Undoubtedly word had spread, but he didn’t pay much mind to the doubters writing the Geyser Gazette. Now, given the bandit’s reaction, he couldn’t help but wonder if some nasty rumors were being tossed around.

  Tugging down his bandanna, he crouched in front of the boy. “I’m not going to eat your soul. I don’t do that.” It felt ridiculous to need to reassure someone of such a thing.

  “But how do I know yer not a larr?” Sweat and tears mixed into a sheen, dripping. “They say yer a larr, biggest there is.”

  “Who says I’m a liar?”

  The boy broke eye contact, as if any more would leave him suddenly soulless. “People.”

  “And do you believe them?”

  Rohm flicked Clyde’s ear. “Are we conducting a poll? Who cares what people say? Help the little brute.”

  Rohm was right. Clyde went to their buggy and retrieved the med kit from where the rental agent said it’d be: under the driver’s seat. He returned with it and unbuckled the leather case.

  Apparently whoever had rented their buggy previously was the accident-prone sort. All that remained were two mushed cotton balls and a spool that once held medical tape.

  “I’m dead,” the boy said, shaking his head at the barren med kit. “I always knew I’d die out here, just like Daddy said.” He glanced the way the bandits had gone. “I just never thought he’d be the—”

  “That was your father, the man who shot you?”

  The boy nodded, casting his gaze down.

  “Blimey,” Rohm murmured.

  The boy looked up, squinting. “Is that mouse really talkin’ or . . . am I . . .” And in an unsettling display, the boy’s neck became boneless. He slumped over, arms flopping wide, sand rushing out from under him.

  With nothing holding it, the gunshot wound filled and spilled over, blood trickling as if from a faucet. Clyde scrambled for something, anything, to tie it off.

  “The strap, Mr. Clyde, the sword strap.”

  Snatching up Commencement’s sheath, Clyde unclipped the leather band from either end of the ornate scabbard and quickly wrapped it around the boy’s leg, above the injury, and drew it tight.

  The red river slowed, then stopped.

  Rohm sighed with relief.

  In all the commotion, Clyde had forgotten Nevele had called. He unclipped the clunky radio from his belt, drew out its antennae. “Nevele? I’m here. We just got into a bit of a . . .” No need to worry her. “How’d it go with the informant?”

  Static.

  “Nevele?”

  He double-checked the frequency.

  “Nevele, it’s Clyde. Come in.”

  Static.

  Something tapped him on a shoulder, then his nose. He flinched as a blast of thunder heralded the storm’s arrival—as if the dark sky hadn’t been a sufficient hint. That explained the interference, at least. Nevele did say she was headed home, right? That much is a good sign.

  Their buggy was well past hope. The engine had broken free, the steaming black fist sag
ging from the vehicle’s underbelly. Dripping, greasy tubes and important-looking wires dangled, torn. Clyde hadn’t the foggiest how to repair it.

  “So now what?” Rohm said, taking shelter in Clyde’s hood.

  Lost. Bloody kid on the ground. Dead buggy. And

  now rain.

  “I’ve no idea.”

  CHAPTER 3

  A Broken King

  Rusty bedsprings made their usual morning music. Careful of fragile joints, the skeletal old man sat up, his beard uncoiling from how he wore it when he slept, an organic scarf.

  Still alive. Sigh.

  After emptying his bladder into the bucket, he moved to the plastic crate where he kept his clothes. He stayed on tiptoes; if he were to lay a bare foot down, he’d likely leave its sole there, peeled off and frozen to the floor.

  Even after cocooning himself in long underwear, three sweaters, insulated trousers, and a down coat with a fur-trimmed hood, he shivered. Belting up, he paused, noticing he’d run out of holes in the strip of leather. He rummaged through the heaps of junk for a screwdriver and a hammer. New hole punched in, he buckled, a foot and a half of leather dangling. This used to be a problem for him, but it’d been running short of holes on the other end.

  Pitka Gorett approached the mirror, pulling his hair free from the shirt so it fell white around his shoulders. Previously it’d been a regal silver, still bearing stripes of nutty brown. But a year in the ice caps had sapped any lingering color from him.

  Opening his eyelids wide, he stared into his own pupils, waiting for any squiggles to show within. He’d been instructed to do this each morning; the eyes were the easiest place to catch an infection’s first signs. He stepped back from the mirror, what had once been the rearview for an auto. His eyes were clear. Nothing outside the usual self-contempt.

  Gorett stepped out of his storage closet of a chamber, into the hall, wondering what hellishness today held. Whatever it was couldn’t have been so bad, since the frosty air was perfumed with whatever they had on the grill . . .

  Downright nauseating to him once, grilled slitherer now made Gorett’s stomach fidget and mouth flood. He looked forward to Slitherer Day. It was about the only way to tell what day of the week it was, since the transitions between them were indiscernible—the suns, this far north, never set.