Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2)

by J. C. Staudt

  Villagers lay in smoking heaps at the foot of the stronghold walls, moaning in agony, furless skin pink and bubbling. Kroy was there, tangled in the mass of bodies, his arm extended toward the heights. He was reaching out to her, lips moving soundlessly. Lizneth’s stomach turned. She wasn’t sure whether it was the unborn young stirring inside her or the sheer horror of it all.

  When the Marauders ran out of saltrock to throw, they switched to their slings. Thanks to constant drilling, Sniverlik’s soldiers were skilled with the weapons. The small lead bullets packed a punch, and they soon began striking home to great effect. When the hu-mans saw the ineffectiveness of their firebombs and arrows against the saltrock fortress, they sounded the retreat.

  A shout went up among the Marauders, but it was short-lived. The calaihn fell back to the far end of the snake’s spine, but they weren’t leaving. They knew as well as the Marauders did that all they had to do was wait. Lizneth wondered whether she’d get a chance to take her siblings and run while the calaihn weren’t watching. But her chance didn’t come that day. Nor would it come the next day, or the next, or the one after that. The calaihn were always watching, and as long as they were out there and the Marauders were in here, there would be no escape.

  CHAPTER 37

  Commune

  “He isn’t showing any signs of improvement,” said Theodar Urial, releasing Jiren Oliver’s eyelid to let it snap back into place.

  They were sitting in the shadows of the sprawling cafeteria on the basement floor of a high-rise near the heart of South Belmond. Jiren had given no reaction during Theodar’s examination, yielding to the apothecary’s touch without rancor. Over the past few weeks, he had eaten what food and drink they gave him, and had traveled under his own strength with others to guide him. They had helped him relieve himself a few times a day, cleaning and washing him whenever he lost control of his bowels. Beyond that, he had remained unresponsive.

  Raith leaned forward and put his head in his hands. How much longer can we go on like this? he wondered. Jiren isn’t the man he used to be; that much is clear. At what point did a man stop being a man and start being… something else?

  Jiren hadn’t spoken a word since Merrick Bouchard woke him from death. Whether this was some cruel twist of the fates or not, Raith was running out of reasons to keep him alive. Yet the thought of giving up on him was as painful as that of leaving Rostand Beige captive to the master-king.

  The building over their heads was the liveliest of all the tenements Raith had seen since he came to Belmond. Access to the upper floors was prohibited to all but those its inhabitants deemed safe. Gates cordoned off every staircase and elevator shaft, each of which was guarded around the clock. The building’s most startling feature, however, was the one that separated it from all the others—and the one which had brought them here.

  It was crawling with mutants.

  Merrick’s following had grown, but he needed more. He wasn’t likely to win the nomads’ support any time soon, and the Gray Revenants had maintained their neutrality in regards to his campaign for the city north. The mutants, on the other hand, made up a significant portion of the city south’s population.

  Merrick had expressed his hatred of the muties, as he called them, on more than one occasion. But he could not deny the value they would add to his ranks if he could convince them to rally behind his cause. Once Raith and the Sons had made him see that, he’d agreed to give it a try. After I heal a few of them, he’d claimed, the rest will follow like puppies.

  The crowds were a constant now; a noisy herd exceeding a thousand in number, by Raith’s estimation. Most were waiting their turn to receive the healer’s touch. Too few were there to support his claim on the north, though Merrick didn’t see it that way. Blinded by arrogance and accustomed to their idolatry, he now believed his followers were there because they loved him. Meanwhile, he had continued to love them in other ways.

  When the mutant envoy came to retrieve them from the basement, Raith crossed the room and knocked on the kitchen door. “Merrick, it’s time to go up.”

  “Come in,” came the muffled shout from within.

  Raith had no desire subject himself to Merrick’s ill-considered escapades yet again, but in the interest of civility toward their hosts, he twisted the handle and pushed open the door. The kitchen was dim and dirty, coated in the sour stench of spoiled dairy. On a mattress near the wall, the healer was fumbling for his clothes while the companions to either side of him writhed and giggled beneath the blankets.

  “The mutant envoy is here for you,” Raith said, lowering his eyes. This young fool thinks himself well-liked, he thought with disgust. These women are after one thing—and it isn’t him.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” Merrick said with a chuckle.

  “Best hurry,” Raith advised. “These mutants don’t strike me as patient people.”

  Merrick’s smile withered. “Lighten up. I said I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Raith shut the door, too hard. Merrick was becoming harder to endure each day, but that wasn’t the only thing making him weary. His travels with the healer had so far failed to turn up a single one of Decylum’s lost Sons. He was beginning to think there was no one left to find. Making for Sai Calgoar to rescue Ros by storm was sounding better all the time. They were still trapped, though; trapped in the above-world with no way to find home.

  Borain Guaidir had been shadowing them since they joined up with Merrick, a presence more felt than seen. Raith had spoken to the nomad guide once or twice, but the man had otherwise kept out of sight. Raith hadn’t seen him in a few days, but he had no doubt Borain would be there to take them back to Sai Calgoar when the time came.

  Merrick emerged from the kitchen without his consorts, looking pleased with himself as he smoothed the wrinkles in his shirt and shorts. He’d bartered his healing services for some new clothes and a curiosity or two. He now wore a brown t-shirt and denim cutoffs, both a snug fit for him. He also carried a compact black pistol with a worn-out magazine and five rounds of ammunition in a leather belt holster. Derrow had scoffed at that, claiming he wasn’t a true blackhand if he needed a firearm to protect himself.

  “They’re waiting,” Raith said.

  Merrick gave him an icy stare. “I heard you the first ten times.”

  Raith said nothing.

  “By the way, you made a mistake a second ago. You said you didn’t think the mutants were patient people.”

  “You disagree?”

  Merrick nodded. “They’re not people.”

  Raith knew Merrick was trying to provoke him, but he answered anyway. “I didn’t realize you were the foremost authority on measuring a person’s humanness.”

  Merrick snorted. “A dway can’t have his own opinion? Shit, I can’t remember the last time you went a whole day without telling me yours.”

  Opinions like yours are poison to the untouchables of this world, Raith might’ve said. “You mistake guidance for imposition. It has never been my intention to—”

  “Leave it alone, Raithur. I wanted to learn from you, not be told how to think.”

  Raith opened his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. “We shouldn’t keep them waiting. Derrow?”

  Derrow stood from his seat beside Jiren. “Keep an eye on him while I’m gone.” Jiren’s condition had plagued Derrow worst of all, the evidence plain in his slumped shoulders and the dark circles beneath his eyes.

  Mercer Terblanche, leaning against the wall with closed eyes, nodded.

  Raith and Derrow escorted Merrick from the cafeteria and followed the lone mutant through the stairwell door. Four other mutants were waiting at the bottom of the stairs, each his own picture of disfigurement. They were armed with cobbled weapons, some of which resembled firearms. The tallest among them had a slender neck that seemed too long somehow. The shortest walked on squat mismatched legs, one of which ended in a shapeless stump. The mutant standing in front had a writhing tentacle where its right a
rm should’ve been.

  Raith had caught glimpses of mutants from afar, but he’d never seen one up close. The five of them together gave off a thin rancid smell, somewhere between mildew and raw fish. The smell wasn’t bad enough to make Raith and Derrow forget their manners, but Merrick pinched his nose and grimaced in disgust.

  When the tentacled mutant spoke, Raith realized there was a woman beneath that homely face and the oddly-placed bulges beneath her clothes. “After you,” she said. The tentacle made a wet sound when she gestured.

  They started up the stairs with the five mutants following.

  The gate at the top of the second floor was thin but sturdy, a web of welded steel from handrail to ceiling. The guards let them through, and they ascended until the envoy stopped them on the sixteenth floor. The smell hit Raith as soon as the door opened. It was that same mutant smell, but many times stronger, as if someone had been cooking it into the walls for a long year. He swallowed and forged ahead.

  Merrick lifted his shirt to cover his nose as they walked, grunting his displeasure with every breath. Raith’s heart went out to their hosts, as much for the horrors they lived with every day as for the healer’s tactless behavior.

  The hallway was a tunnel to nowhere, narrow and dark, packed with refuse. Ahead of them lay the leapfrogging doors of at least two dozen apartments. Some of the doors were open. Raith promised himself he would look neither left nor right, but somehow he couldn’t help it.

  The things he glimpsed in those bereft corners and dimly lit rooms were enough to bring him to the fringes of his sanity. Spinal bones crusted with spurs growing through skin; eroded facial tissue that left teeth and nasal cavities exposed; limbs so twisted and malformed he wondered if they had ever been human to begin with; and boils. Boils on every empty patch of skin, running in clusters across necks and shoulders and legs, many ruptured and weeping fluid.

  “Here,” one of the mutants rasped from behind them.

  Raith stopped at the next door, a right-hand entrance leading into a tiny apartment with a grimy kitchenette and an open sleeping area. Derrow waited in the doorway while Raith and Merrick entered. On a tousled queen bed with stained white sheets lay a child; an infant, no more than a month old by the look of it. This was one of the only children Raith had seen since he left home. The child’s limbs were well-formed, but its skin was covered in boils.

  The child’s mother sat in an armchair beside the bed, emaciated but for her left leg, which was swollen to twice the size of her right. A heavy bulge protruded from her left shoulder; thin wisps of black hair clung to a scalp overrun with boils.

  When Merrick saw the child, he made a heaving noise in his throat and had to look away.

  “Are you alright?” Raith asked him.

  Merrick gathered his resolve. “This is who they want me to heal?”

  Raith gave the woman a glance. She in turn looked to the doorless refrigerator in the kitchenette, where a thin man Raith hadn’t noticed before was standing.

  “My boy,” the man said in a fragile voice. He lifted a hand toward the child. A row of moldering nubs were all that remained of his fingers.

  Raith gave the man a slow nod, then turned to Merrick. “Are you okay to do this?”

  Merrick didn’t answer. He was staring down at his hands, lost in some trance he couldn’t seem to escape. After a long moment, he bent over the bed to scoop the motionless child into his arms.

  When the little one stirred, his mother gasped. Her eyes welled up and she began to cry.

  Merrick didn’t ignite straightaway. He stood there for a time, cradling the boy in his arms. “I’ve never held a baby before,” he said without looking up.

  “They remind us of how precious and fragile life truly is,” Raith said.

  Merrick nodded, as if to himself. “I’m going to try.”

  Raith stood back.

  The walls blushed a dull orange. Raith was pleased to see Merrick letting the fire grow slowly, the way he had taught him. Less wasted heat meant less stress on himself and his patient.

  The babe began to squirm, then gave a squeal of what sounded like happiness. An orange smile lit Merrick’s face as the child’s mother and father looked on in astonishment, mouths agape. For a few short moments, it appeared as though Merrick’s touch was the answer.

  Then the worst happened.

  The child’s tiny head lolled to one side. The light left its eyes, and its body went limp.

  Merrick frowned. He persisted, pushing his ignition further.

  Raith smelled burning flesh, now stronger than the apartment’s fishy mutant scent.

  Merrick wasn’t ready to give up yet. He strained until the glow was so bright the others in the apartment had to shield their eyes. Dark lines snaked up his arms, veins turning black against the white-hot glow building within him. Skin melted from muscle and bone, and it was not Merrick’s skin alone anymore. His heat was burning the child as well.

  Raith waited.

  He saw Merrick sway on his feet, and still he waited.

  “What’s he trying to do?” Derrow shouted.

  Raith held up a hand.

  When Merrick opened his mouth, white light burst forth, waves of heat escaping him like a furnace’s breath. He began to shake as the glow crept up his arms and neck, his skin a red-orange film over his body’s infernal fire.

  The woman screamed when she saw what was happening to her child. She scrambled over the bed and made to grab the infant, but flinched away when she felt the heat. The father approached Merrick next, but he too shied away.

  Raith took Merrick by the shoulders. “Enough, Merrick. It’s no use. The child is gone.”

  Merrick didn’t stop.

  Raith could only hold on for a few seconds before the heat became too much for him. He let go and stood back while Merrick’s fire grew ever brighter. The sheets draped over the side of the bed in front of him began to curl and wither. The wallpaper behind him crisped and darkened.

  Merrick screamed as he poured every ounce of himself into the child. Pure white light emanated from him like the light-star’s rays, blinding everyone in the room. His fingers were little more than bone now, his forearms bound in white-hot sheets of flesh. His hair stirred on the hot breeze. The clothing around his midsection took flame.

  That was when Raith knew he had to end it. The air around Merrick seemed to crackle with static as he drew near. Fates forgive me, Raith thought, drawing back to strike Merrick a blow across the head.

  Before he could bring his fist forward, the light went out.

  Merrick faltered, then toppled to the bed in a smoldering heap. Both he and the child were smoking like something pulled off a grilling iron. And the smell… the smell was beyond definition.

  Raith rolled Merrick onto his back. The healer was unconscious; the child’s body flopped from his arms, a smooth cauterized pink. Raith tossed a sheet over the infant, wishing there were some way to spare his parents the agony of seeing him.

  It was too late. The father fell to his knees with a mournful wail. The mother rifled through a nightstand drawer and drew out a gleaming blade. She dived across the bed before Raith could stop her and drove the point into Merrick’s face.

  Raith felt a pinch in his lower back, so sharp it made him go stiff. He turned, reeling, to find one of their escorts armed with his own blade, now wet with Raith’s blood. In the doorway, Derrow was staring wide-eyed at the knife handle protruding from his abdomen.

  “This is what we do to outsiders who murder our own,” the mutant croaked.

  We were trying to help, Raith wanted to say. But his voice would not come to him amid the pain, and there were others closing in on him now, filling the tiny room, brandishing sawblades and axes and clubs. The woman was stabbing Merrick in the cheek, the eye, the throat. Merrick lay motionless beneath her assault.

  Raith ignited. “Away,” he shouted. “Away, all of you.”

  They gave a collective start when his shield flickered to li
fe. He couldn’t carry Merrick while shielded, and he couldn’t extinguish himself with half a dozen mutants waiting to kill him. There was no way out but to fight.

  For this, may the fates also forgive me, he thought, just before he sprang forward to tear every mutant in the room to shreds.

  A few moments later he was dragging Merrick down the hall while Derrow stumbled after them, one hand pressed to the bleeding wound in his stomach. Mutants watched from their doorways, but did not interfere. Nor did they give chase when Raith heaved Merrick over his shoulder and carried him down the long flights of steps to the gate on the second floor.

  “I do not wish to compromise your defenses,” he told the guards there. “But if you don’t let us through, I will tear this gate off its hinges.”

  The guards looked at each other, studied their three visitors, then glanced up the stairs. They opened the gate and let them through without a word.

  When Raith opened the cafeteria door a minute later, the Sons of Decylum came rushing to his aid. Derrow staggered in behind him.

  “What happened?” asked Mercer.

  “What in all the Aionach…” Theodar breathed.

  “Look at his face. It’s—”

  “Clear off a table and lay him down,” Raith said. “He’s undergone a great deal of trauma. Theodar, see to Derrow’s wound.”

  They had just gotten Merrick settled when they heard shouts from beyond the doors.

  “Did they follow you down?” Mercer asked.

  “You’d better come see this,” said Gregar Holdsaard from his spot beside the window. “There’s some crazy shit going on outside.”

  They rushed over to join him. Raith struggled to rise from his chair and limped over.

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Brence Maisel.

  “I’m fine. Sore from carrying Merrick down all those stairs.”

  Concern darkened Brence’s brow, but he nodded and went to the window with the others while Theodar put pressure on Derrow’s wound.