Etherwalker

by Cameron Dayton

  Enoch met his master’s eyes, waiting.

  “You are upset because you can’t understand their reactions. Their emotions. You are upset because this is a pattern you cannot understand.”

  Pulling a clean rag from his satchel, Master Gershom dabbed at the salve on Enoch’s lip. Enoch wanted to pull away, wanted to shout, wanted to call his master wrong. But he felt the truth of those words.

  “That is why I have to keep you isolated from the others, Enoch. Because you do not feel as they do. Or see as they do. You were not meant to.”

  Enoch had learned that he could not always depend on his master for clarity, or for help. Eight years ago, Enoch had climbed too far up into the ironwood tree behind the stable. Master Gershom had come out at Enoch’s pleading and then stood under that tree all night, quietly. Eventually Enoch had fallen, hands numb from keeping such a frightened grip on that branch, and Master Gershom had let him fall. He then picked up the sobbing boy from the ground, carried him inside, and bound his broken arm. Enoch remembered the only words his master had for him that night:

  “You found your way down.”

  The shadows lengthened as the two neared home, the dark trees seeming to absorb the night as it soaked down from the mountainside. Enoch went to check on the sheep as his master took the iron he had purchased into the tool shed.

  They had a silent dinner of stew and toasted bread, sweetened with a dollop of red berry preserves that Master Gershom kept at the top of the pantry. Enoch supposed that the rare treat was some sort of unspoken sympathy for the earlier trauma. It certainly wasn’t an apology.

  Enoch went to his bed near the stove, tired and aching. Sadly, his mind would not let him sleep, replaying too-clear images and sounds and memories of hard fists against his jaw. Enoch decided these thoughts wouldn’t take him anywhere, so he pushed his thoughts back to the game he had seen Ben and Jason playing. It was a simple pattern, but it held so much potential for complexity.

  Enoch played through the game again in his mind, trying to discover if there had been some hidden trap in the four-gray-stone defense. By the time the full moon had risen over the cottage, Enoch had concluded that the strategy was as useless as it had seemed—in fact, it was one of fifteen possible formations that guaranteed a loss. Enoch began to devise different action strings that would have granted Jason a victory in less than ten turns. The patterns and their subsequent responses were just as fascinating as a duel, and Enoch lost all track of time.

  By the time the sky began to grow bright, Enoch had constructed a rolling unit of black and gray stones in his mind; the unit could be arrayed in five turns and could sweep the board clean in three more looping “super turns,” after which it would fold in on itself until only one white stone was left in the center hole.

  Enoch sat up in bed, rubbing his head as Master Gershom began to stir in his bed across the kitchen.

  What a foolish game—it is impossible to lose if you move first.

  He puzzled over it until his master had started cooking breakfast, thin strips of mutton sizzling in an iron pan. The older man finally noticed the red, puffy eyes of his charge.

  “Couldn’t sleep?”

  Enoch blinked a few times and shook his head.

  “No . . . I’m just . . . I just can’t stop thinking about that game they were playing. I keep going over different ways they each could have moved their pieces for victory, and then finding new ways to counter each—”

  Enoch noticed that his master was frowning.

  “I should have warned you about getting your thoughts caught in that sort of thing. It can be dangerous for you, Enoch.”

  Enoch was not sure what he meant. “You mean I can’t play games like that?”

  “No, no—you can certainly play them. In fact, they can be wonderful tools for sharpening your . . . your talents. You just need to learn how to moderate your fascination.

  “This particular game is called jedrez demonyos, and has been around in one form or another for ages. Your dear young friends were right about one thing; the stones represent beasts and warriors from ages past. The object of the game is to collect prey for your angels while denying the angels of your opponent.”

  “Except there is no use in pretending the pieces are living things, Master,” said Enoch. “They don’t vary in strength, and they don’t tire or grow hungry. They always move exactly like they are supposed to. They are more like a series of actions.”

  “Of course you see it that way, Enoch. You see patterns and sequences where others see the pieces as tiny replicas of the creatures they were named after, unable to look beyond symbolic individuality and into the actual workings of the game. Their moves will always be reactive and shortsighted against an opponent who understands the variability of sequence.”

  Master Gershom smiled, in a warm mood for some reason this morning. He went on to describe the jedrez tables he had seen in his youth, obsidian and marble carved to the exacting detail of every wart and feather.

  Enoch yawned and tried to listen, even though he was still upset; it was rare when his master spoke of the time before. Before Rewn’s Fork and sheep and the endless woods. The quiet boy kept even more still in these occasions, afraid to startle the rare bird that was his master’s lucidity.

  * * * *

  The dull metal of the hoe bit into the soil, slicing a root in half and ringing as it encountered another rock beneath. There were always rocks in the soil—at least, it seemed there were wherever he hoed.

  Mishael Keddrik had called their valley Old Snake’s Pisspot once during a visit to the town. He had laughed about how the lovely spring-fed pools, which watered the land along the foothills, were just a cruel trick to farmers: bounteous clear water wasted on such thin, stony soil. His laughter, however, had withered the second he caught Master Gershom’s scowl. Enoch’s master did not like blasphemous talk. Or talk, in general.

  The memory made Enoch grind his teeth. Lifting the hoe, he swung it down into the soil with a grunt, sweat dripping from the long strands of hair at his forehead. Angry thoughts flashed through his mind.

  I’ll never have friends; I’ll never have anybody to talk with. Not as long as I’m trapped here.

  Enoch knew that he wasn’t trapped. He really had no idea what he would do elsewhere, and people confused him. He had a routine here, a comfortable order to daily life. Master Gershom said that routine was important to people who were like Enoch, and that he wouldn’t do well with the unpredictable.

  Then why does the unpredictable seem so interesting?

  He set to hoeing with the single-mindedness that Master Gershom had taught him to use when performing the pensa spada exercises, clearing all other thoughts and feelings from his consciousness and programming his mind with simple, powerful commands.

  Strike. Pull. Step.

  Body moving in smooth obedience, his motions soon became a fluid pattern. The hoe arching through the air, the weeds yanked from the soil, and another step along the row.

  Strike. Pull. Step.

  His breathing soon matched the rhythm, and his heart slowed a pace to synchronize itself with the motion of the swinging hoe. Face blank, eyes transfixed on nothing more than the ground in front of him, Enoch moved swiftly through the sunbaked rows. A dull, familiar pain began to throb at his forehead, something which his sub-conscious mind duly noted to inform him of when he came out of the pensa spada trance. For now there was only focus.

  Strike. Pull. Step.

  Soon he approached the end of the last row, and the trance subsided. The afilia nubla of the sleeping mind canceled subconscious commands and aroused the waking afilia lumin as it, in turn, shut down. Blinking his eyes like he had just woken up, Enoch turned to look at the garden. Piles of knotted weeds lay strewn across neat rows of tilled earth, pale and naked in the bright sun. He rubbed the heel of his hand on his forehead, where icy pain still needled. That had been happening recently when he went into pensa spada—ever since he’d learned to pau
se, actually. He intended to mention the strange aches to his master sooner or later, but it wasn’t urgent.

  Just a little pain.

  If there was one thing that childhood on the edge of the wild had taught Enoch, it was that pain could be ignored. That had been one of the first lessons his master had taught him. Not that Enoch had ever been beaten—Levi Gershom wouldn’t raise his hand in anger. He believed in a different sort of discipline.

  Enoch sighed. His master was the kind of man who could say enough in a few words to make you wish for the kick in the pants you deserved. Enoch remembered a few years ago when he had been caught hunting rockfinches with a sling. Master Gershom had looked down at the still cluster of gray-plumed bodies at Enoch’s feet and sighed.

  “They are so small, boy. Does it please you to bring pain to these tiny things?”

  Then he had put his heavy hand on Enoch’s shoulder, softly repeating the phrase he intoned when a new lamb was born to the flock, something he called The Prayer of the Beasts:

  “Men are made for the Law of God,

  but the beasts and birds obey Him.

  Men sing hymns upon the alter of God,

  but the beasts and birds are His song.”

  Enoch’s sling lay untouched ever since.

  Still rubbing at his brow, Enoch walked from the garden and set the hoe at one side of the utility shed. The windmill poking out from the roof of the shed stood motionless in the slight breeze. Enoch unlatched the rough pine door—tightly fitted to keep moisture and vermin from damaging the more delicate machinery inside—and reached for the sturdy pole, which stuck out perpendicular from the side of the tall center post. He pulled it, angling the blades up into the wind, and then grabbed the worn wooden handle of the crank at the base of the mill.

  Slowly at first and then steadily faster, he began to spin the crank, watching the blades through the thick glass window in the roof. He kept at it until the blades caught the wind and spun on their own, and then he released the handle to thumb the switch on his left. The light above it glowed green weakly at first, but shone stronger as a gust of wind rattled the shed.

  Head still aching, Enoch trotted back to the house, anxious to get his recitings done in what little time the late afternoon breeze would afford him.

  Closing his eyes so that they could adjust, Enoch strode into the darkness. He had known this place all of his life, and even without light, he could see it in his mind. A stout pine table dominated the center of the room, surrounded by two simple stools. To his right, a large hearth of smooth river stones cemented together covered the wall, and the mantle was adorned with a thick beeswax candle—left unlit now that it was summer. Above the mantle would be two crossed practice swords, the wooden blades stained black with the soot his master used to teach him target strikes and edge awareness. Various herbs and sage peppers hung from the roof beams, giving off a sharp, simple smell. Enoch could describe this room down to the last dust mote if asked. It was part of the discipline that he had been taught:

  “Absorb the image into your eyes, into your dream mind—the afilia nubla—and it will be branded there to be seen by your waking mind—the afilia lumin—when it is needed. A good warrior can dance through his fortress blindfolded.”

  Master Gershom was always talking about what a good warrior did. Enoch thought it was kind of silly. For all of his master’s nostalgia for his military past, it really didn’t serve any purpose here. Enoch would grow up to be a shepherd just like everyone else in the borderlands of Midian. Here, a sword was a rare sight, and a man who knew how to use one even more so. The only weapons ever seen were bows for hunting and the occasional sling or staff for protecting the flock. Enoch studied and listened and danced through the pensa spada exercises because Levi Gershom was his master. It was the order of things and always had been.

  What Enoch wanted had nothing to do with anything. Sure, he was curious about his parents. Master Gershom said that they were good people, and that they had loved their son dearly. But now they were dead, and Enoch was all right with that. This place was all he knew. This farm was a comfortable and finite place, circumscribed by trees, sheep, and the atonal breezes which wound down the valley from the white-capped Edrei.

  It was only lately that some of the questions had begun to take on a life of their own. Enoch had tried to quiet them, but the odd contradictions of his life were starting to stand out in relief against the uniformly predictable nature of the whole. Enoch felt . . . unease. It was somewhere in between curiosity and anxiety. And rather than answering his questions, Master Gershom had instructed him to take the mental turmoil and bridle it—turn the tension into a focus for his lessons and recitings. The odd thing was that it had worked, but Enoch wasn’t sure that he wanted it to. The questions felt important.

  Enoch reached the far corner of the room and pulled the hidden screen aside. Oblong and blocky, the Unit squatted in the niche like a rusty dwarf; the light from its small screen bathing the room in blue. Sitting at his stool, Enoch keyed his name into the pad in front of him. The words flashed onto the screen, as they always had:

  ::Welcome Enoch.

  ::What shall we do today?

  The low throb of pain in Enoch’s head surged again, blurring his vision before subsiding. Shaking his head, Enoch wondered if he should lie down until the headache went away.

  And have Master Gershom come home to find me napping?

  Gritting his teeth at the dull ache, he typed in the code for his recitings and leaned back as a list of ballads filled the screen.

  Stories of heroes and their adventures were much less exciting when you had to memorize them in heraldic verse. And the excerpts from The Book of Prophets were even worse—translating from godspeech to commontongue was boring enough without it all being senseless metaphors entirely unrelated to anything in Enoch’s experience. What use did a shepherd have for flowery words from men who had died back before the world had been broken?

  With a groan, Enoch rubbed his forehead. The pain was getting worse. Out of frustration, out of desperation, he closed his eyes and paused—on the off chance that his new trick might help the aching subside.

  Oddly enough, it did. For a few seconds, everything felt clear. Peaceful. Orderly. His thought about the Unit, its connection to the windmill, and the windmill’s connection with the winds which blew into the valley from distant lands. Interesting places. Places with unique scents and colors and tastes, all of which streamed back over the mountains to turn the blades of the windmill and brought the Unit to life. The connection brought Enoch peace.

  Enoch opened his eyes and reached over to key in his recitings. Glancing at the screen, he frowned. Something was wrong. For some reason, the monitor had changed. It seemed to be moving, pulsing, with waves of numbers and letters, a cascade of symbols that twisted and breathed. The dark room seemed to ripple with an aquatic shimmering.

  And now I’ve broken the Unit! Scales!

  Even though he had only thought the word, Enoch reflexively looked over his shoulder. Master Gershom frowned upon such language, and would guarantee no further trips to the village if he knew Enoch was talking like Ben and Jason.

  The ache between his brows intensified, and he mouthed the word with a sneer, whispering, “Scales!”

  The Unit had never acted like this before. Master Gershom treated the thing like a sacred relic, opening the metal box that housed the complicated mechanism every spring to reverently clean and polish the myriad of delicate pieces inside, then carefully putting it all back together.

  Enoch suspected that it was incredibly valuable. Nobody in town had anything like it, and Master Gershom had told Enoch to keep it a secret. And now he would have to tell him that his precious machine was broken.

  Shaking his head, Enoch reached for the cutoff switch.

  A sudden spark shot from his outstretched finger to the keypad. The pain in his head was suddenly unbearable, forcing a moan through his clenched teeth. With a trembling hand, En
och reached over to steady himself against the Unit, and as his watering eyes met the screen, his moan was cut short.

  In the center of the screen was a face. Large eyes—deep and bright and empty—stared at him as though from miles away. Enoch tried to pull away from the eyes with a gasp, fear punctuated by the pain that flared molten in his head. A finger of sharp white electricity leapt from the keypad to his clenched fist, followed by another which forked and wrapped around his other wrist. They held him to the Unit like nails.

  “Help! Master Gershom!”

  Under the pounding of blood in his ears, his voice came to him strangled and weak. On instinct, his mind reached for the pensa spada.

  Something massive and invisible pushed it away.

  The eyes continued to bore into him, and that face, cruel with remote disdain, opened star-crusted lips and spoke.

  “SEAL EARTH AND SKY.”

  The words were made of lightning, and they ripped into Enoch’s skull. He rocked under the blow and began to slip into blackness. Shadows danced at the edges of his vision.

  “SEAL EARTH AND SKY.”

  He felt as though a fire had been ignited between his brow, and he tasted blood. The face seemed to waver, the eyes flickering with momentary static.

  “SEAL EARTH AND SKY!”

  The cry was undeniable, imploring, commanding, plaintive. It was a cry of desperate need and monstrous authority. Enoch gasped, aching with the undeniable need to serve, to obey. A final surge of bright power shot from the monitor as the face melted into a horizontal line that then winked into a pinpoint.

  Then, nothingness. As dull numbness washed over Enoch, he imagined he saw a bird soaring away into the black depths of the monitor.

  Chapter 2

  “Our coming has not been sweet. Alas! Would that we could behold the birth of the sun. What have we done? We were united in our mountains, but our natures have been changed.”

  —Balam Quitze, Balam Acab, Mahucutah, and Iqui Balam, The Progenitors Await the First Dawn

  Mosk knelt stiffly before the altar, forced to stillness under the red light which smoldered from the clerestory above. Except for the occasional twitching of his thorny and segmented hands, he was motionless.