by David Drake
The Heretic
( General - 6 )
David Drake
Tony Daniel
David Drake, Tony Daniel
The Heretic
“Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow
and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”
— William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust
PART ONE:
The Scout
1
“Bows and muskets, blood and dust-” six-year-old Abel Dashian sing-songed as he played in the yard of the temple storehouse. The afternoon was hot and humid, and the air was still.
He jumped from capstone to capstone upon the carved blocks of reddish-yellow stelae that surrounded the storehouse, teetering perilously, gloriously, on the brink of a fall to the hard-packed dirt below.
Teetering, yes-but never quite falling. Abel knew he would make his next jump, and the next. He liked that he was good at stuff like this, better than most boys his age.
“Flint and powder, broken bones-”
Nearby was the pile of baggage he was supposed to be watching while his father checked in with the district’s ruling cleric, Prelate Zilkovsky. Abel and his father had been in Hestinga for several days, having hooked up with a fast caravan to arrive earlier than expected. His father had used the extra days of leave to acquire a dwelling near the military compound, to find a nanny for Abel, and generally to set up housekeeping. Abel had gotten to know some of his new neighborhood, but spent most of his time unpacking his cache of personal belongings, including the treasured locks of his dead mother’s hair.
Today was the first official visit Abel’s father had made to the district priest, and custom required that he present his family-which was, in his case, only Abel-when he reported in. His father, whose name was Joab, had brought along the official deliveries he’d been charged with transporting from the capital to Hestinga.
The day before, Abel had finally given in to his curiosity, pulled back the large reed mat that covered the stack of items in a corner of the common room at his home, and taken a peek at this material. He had no idea what most of it was, but he had noticed a basket full of blank papyrus scrolls. Abel loved to draw, and spent a few moments lusting after them. Then he’d turned his attention to a carefully wrapped case with something hard bound within in it-carefully wrapped, but not so hard to open, even for smaller fingers. The case revealed a shiny new set of obsidian sacrificing knives. His father had walked in from watering the donts and caught him just before Abel made the major mistake of touching one of the knives.
“These were sent to the district prelate by the Abbot of Lindron himself,” his father said. “How do you think it would look if Zilkovsky found a bunch of fingerprints all over them?”
Seeing Abel’s downcast eyes, his father had taken pity upon him and given Abel one of his old throwing knives as a consolation prize. Abel had spent a happy afternoon practicing with it against a wooden post.
Today, Abel had been put in charge of watching over this baggage while his father went in to make his initial presentation, and he was determined to keep himself away from the sacrificing knives, which he still longed to play with.
I want to see one of those knives split papyrus, Abel thought. A friend back in Lindron had seen a prelate do that once with an obsidian blade. No. Absolutely cannot touch. Father will whip me ragged.
So he’d looked around for something to distract himself, and soon noticed an interesting picture that was carved on the sides of the standing stones that ringed a nearby large building. He’d wandered over to see what it was.
A carnadon. A dangerous river beast. And a really good likeness, too. Carnadons were Abel’s favorite animals.
The carnadon carved on these stelae was a symbol the priesthood liked to use-he’d seen it near all the holy sites in Lindron-but he wasn’t exactly sure what it meant.
Each stela had a carnadon relief carving on it, and who could resist climbing up on top and jumping from stone to stone to get away from them?
Not Abel Dashian, that was for sure.
Each of the roughhewn stone uprights was rectangular, flat on top, and wide enough for a boy to stand squarely upon with a couple of steps to spare. They were squat, planted deep into the sandy ground, rising to about the height of a tall man’s chest. The gap between the stelae was perhaps a stride and a half, which was a length that Abel could span with a jump-barely.
“I’m the one you’ll never catch,” he chanted and leaped through the air. He landed on the next stone, took a stutter step, and leaped again, continuing the ancient jingle, a song his mother had sung to him on the cradleboard and then, because he often requested it, through the years up until her death. “I’m the one who catches you.”
Land on a stone top, leap, land, and leap again.
“You don’t scare me, carnadon. Beer and barley, lead and copper, I’m the Carnadon Man!”
Abel pretended he was crossing the River at one of its rare fording points and must leap from rock to rock to avoid being snatched and eaten. The carnadons lived in hunting packs thick along the riverbanks near the wide spots in the water’s flow. River carnadons were creatures horned with scale. They walked about on land with small legs, but in the water they possessed a powerful swimming tail. Their main feature, however, at least by Abel’s lights, was a large mouth equipped with a jaw on a flexible hinge that could open wide and swallow a young boy whole.
Abel was both terrified and spellbound by River carnadons. When he’d lived in Garangipore as a very young child, one of his first memories was of watching from the terrace porch of the officer’s residence where his family dwelled as carnadons wallowed on the riverbank below. Then in Lindron, his father had taken him to see the Great Tabernacle moats, which were full of well-fed carnadons kept as pets by the high priests.
He’d watched an afternoon feeding and seen the creatures swallow chunks of meat as big as barrels without once chewing. In the River, the creatures made their grisly living on fish and weak land creatures. In Garangipore, he’d seen one bring down a young herbidak that visited the riverbanks to graze. Carnadons also didn’t mind feasting on the occasional villager when they got the chance-a fact which his mother had never let him forget.
I won’t forget, Mamma.
“Teeth all snapping, tails all whapping, try to bite me if you can!”
Even though Abel was only six, he knew that the stone from which the stelae were made was not local. It was rock from the desert wastes beyond the River: the Redlands. Here in the valley, the natural stone was always black or dark brown like river mud unless you dug a hole very deep. You never saw buildings made of stone like this in Lindron, the city where Abel had lived for the past year, and the city where his mother had died. But here in Hestinga, near the Valley Escarpment, there were official buildings and even a few houses made from the red stone.
“You can’t catch me, I’m the Carnadon Man!”
Abel completed his second circuit of the storehouse yard and sprang down. He took the landing with bended knees and rolled as his father had taught him Scouts did when jumping from a rooftop or a cliff. He came up facing the door to the building the stones circled. It had the look of some kind of storehouse, maybe an old granary. The structure was made of the same Redlands stone as the stelae, but the door was of thick-plaited river cane and looked solid, many layers thick. A pile of windblown sand had built up at its base. There were no hinges on the door that Abel could see.
Maybe it swings inside to out, Abel thought. Or maybe it slides to the side into an opening. That would be interesting to see.
Abel had always been good at picturing sizes and arrangements of things in the world, and figuring out how things moved or might l
ook on the other side just by thinking about them. He’d been surprised to find that not everybody could do this, not even some adults.
On the right side of the matted door was a metal plate with a long piece of flat, dark metal emerging from it. Abel moved closer and saw that the flat piece was the shaft of a key. It was sticking out of a keyhole.
Abel had seen metal locks like this before in Lindron on the very old buildings, but this was the first he’d come across in the week they’d lived here in Hestinga. He’d been interested enough to ask his father how locks worked, and his father had demonstrated a wooden version on a small reed chest in his office that held his military credentials and the jade insectoid scarab he used to set a wax seal on official documents.
This key is larger. It’s huge.
Abel approached warily. It was at about eye-height to him. He reached up, touched it.
Cold metal. Old metal.
It was made of steel, not iron, and was perfectly smooth. He ran a finger along its edge. It had the fine-cut profile of nishterlaub, a holy metal item from the Chaos Times, the nightmare days before the Law had been revealed to the priests by Zentrum, and the priests brought peace to the Land. Abel knew what to do if he found nishterlaub. Don’t touch. Tell a priest.
But the storehouse was in the midst of the Treville District temple compound. Everyone obviously knew about it. This nishterlaub had been collected by the priests themselves. So what could it hurt to-
Before Abel quite realized what he was doing, he turned the key.
Click.
The lock was well-oiled and offered no resistance. Turning the key caused a plate on the door to pop out from its recess by a finger span to reveal a small pulling ring.
Never saw anything like that before.
In fact, the lock seemed as complicated as the most complex thing Abel knew: the firing mechanism on his father’s musket. Abel had seen plenty of those. He was the son of a soldier, after all. But complicated or not, with a musket what it finally came down to was pulling the trigger.
So just pull it. See what happens.
Abel grasped the ring and leaned backward. The door didn’t budge.
The sand. The buildup at the base of the door was keeping it in place. Abel swept it away with the sole of his sandal.
He tried again, this time throwing all his might into the effort. The door moved, swung outward an arm’s length. Abel stumbled back a step as a whoosh of musty air escaped. It set him to coughing.
After he recovered, Abel glanced inside. Dark, but some light got in through window slits set in rows around all four walls. Still, pretty scary in there. Abel stepped away, glanced around the storehouse yard.
There wasn’t much by way of a weapon to carry along with him, not even a stick. There was a stone, a black rock from here in the Valley, sitting not far away that, upon further examination, Abel figured must have been intended as a doorstop.
It was all he could do to pick it up with both hands and carry it next to his belly, but any weapon was better than nothing. So armed, he returned to the door and slipped inside the storehouse.
The air inside was cool and stale. He looked up and saw that the window slits near the ceiling were covered with actual glass. Glass was not considered nishterlaub, but it was something you could only find and were not allowed to make, so windows were rare in the Land. Windows were for priests and high officials. Windows were for keeping out rain and wind from important places.
And I guess for some storehouses, Abel thought.
Anyway, you normally didn’t need windows in the Land. Strong gusts sometimes blew up the Valley before the spring floods, but usually the winds of the Land were light. Abel had never seen any rain, but his mother had sung him jingles about it. The songs were about water falling from the sky, as strange as that sounded. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in rain, it was more that he had a hard time picturing it. Abel imagined rain as thick and syrupy, falling brown and silty like the River’s water, and leaving everything with a fine coating of mud.
After his eyes adjusted, Abel stepped farther inside the storehouse. It was a large room, large enough to contain an average-sized house. The ceiling stretched a good twenty spans above him. The official residence he and his father shared could fit in here easily, with space to spare for an outhouse and stable.
This is sure no granary.
All about him were shapes. Twisted, strange shapes like midnight shadows. Large, square shapes. The glint of iron and copper and steel. Glass. Wood. In front of him, a white-colored pipe stretching out perpendicular from some sort of box with what looked like dead briars curling out. Odd. The pipe glinted almost a bit like metal, a bit like glass.
He reached out and touched it-
And recoiled in shock. Plastic.
The pipe was nishterlaub. Abel looked around again and realization dawned. The pipe, the strange shapes, everything in the storehouse. It was all nishterlaub.
His immediate thought was to turn tail and run, find a priest or his father, tell them what he’d found.
But that’s stupid, he thought. The priests know the nishterlaub is here. They must have put it here. But I’ll bet I will still get in trouble.
Was it wrong for him to be here?
Most of his friends from Lindron would sure think so. Of course, most of them wouldn’t have opened the door in the first place. He’d barely been able to convince those guys to leave the alley behind the married officer’s quarters. He’d dared them to go out and explore, and when nobody accompanied him, he’d gone himself.
Abel felt the familiar pain of remembering Lindron. Lindron was the before life. All gone.
Gone with Mamma.
She’d called him her brave boy, her little Carnadon Man. Was he still brave without her?
He would try to be. And the priests could give him a hiding if they wanted, he didn’t care. Besides, he knew he’d start wondering about the nishterlaub and have to come back to have a look at it sooner or later. He’d be back.
So might as well look around now.
Interesting, said a voice. It was a dry voice, high pitched. Abel was unable to tell if it had come from a man or woman. He spun around. Nothing. No one there.
He moved deeper into the storage house.
A likely lad, maybe , another voice said, this one deeper and definitely male. Then again, maybe not.
Abel lifted the rock he carried in his hands to his shoulder, ready to strike.
“Who’s there?” he said, trying not to let his voice quiver with the fright he felt.
No one answered.
After a moment, Abel decided he must have heard soldiers speaking outside. The storage house was next to the temple guard exercise yard, after all. Maybe a platoon had shown up for morning duty.
But the voices had sounded close. Very close.
Okay, it’s time to get out of here.
Abel turned to go.
But all this nishterlaub, he thought. I have to see it.
He looked to his right, to the strange box-shaped thing growing briars with the white plastic pipe emerging from it.
Not briars. Not anything that grew from the earth. Abel stooped down, looked closer. They were like vines, yet unlike. A sheath of colorful skin covered a core that glinted reddish-brown, like copper. No, it was copper, somehow.
Electrical wires, the high-pitched voice said. To carry a fluid that is more powerful than gunpowder, than water gathered into a ram. You could think of it as liquid sunlight. The liquid sun brought the machine alive, and it-
Show him, said the low, gruff voice.
Very well. Observe:
Suddenly, the nishterlaub was alive. It beeped like some kind of strange, wounded flitter or an insectoid in the trees at night. Flames like evening glowflies flickered across its surface.
Abel gasped, stumbled back.
This is a simulation. It’s a picture painted inside your mind, child. Observe:
And Abel did observe. He was in
the room, but not in the room, and the machine, the nishterlaub, was different.
It was fixed. It worked.
The machine chimed, a door slid open in its side, and from it emerged…
Made things. Wonderful things. Like an oven that baked bread in all sorts of shapes, only this oven baked useful items. Tools. A procession of items emerged: hammers, rakes, shoes, scissors, pens …and then other things whose names began to flood Abel’s mind: simple navigation computer, powerpack for kitchen appliances, medical diagnostic meter, pellet gun, wristwatch.
This thing was the Oven of Zentrum. It baked …nishterlaub!
And then it stopped. The vision disappeared, and the ancient machine stood before him, as destroyed as it had been moments before.
One of many such three-dimensional printers, said the dry, high-pitched voice. Nothing special to those who came before the Collapse. Resolution moderate to low. Production value self-limiting. Cheap goods, made to become obsolete quickly. Unfortunately, no independent power source remains, and key metallic elements have been removed and destroyed or repurposed. Quite useless.
Abel started back. The voice again. He picked up his rock, which had fallen to his feet when he’d touched the…now he knew its name…the three-dimensional printer.
No one was here.
Who was speaking?
It has to be the nishterlaub talking, doesn’t it?
Was this why the priests kept it to themselves? But if the nishterlaub spoke, why did they abandon it here in the storage house? Obviously no one had been inside this building for a long, long time.
Three point five Duisberg years, said the high-pitched voice. It was opened for the delivery of a piano.
The meaning of what a piano was suddenly flooded Abel’s mind-along with quick images of its use. Abel tried to grasp what he was being shown, but shook his head stubbornly after a moment.
“Cut that out,” he said aloud. “Stop making me think things I don’t ask to think. Anyway, I get it. It’s a kind of musical instrument, right?”