by R. Lee Smith
Jazuun breathed in deep and let it out slow, looking out over the city as if all the sins and wisdoms of its uncounted masses could be seen and weighed in a glance. “You have a great deal of faith in men,” he said at last.
“More than I had at the start of this journey, but it is Sheul whose faith in men burns brightest. We believe that only He can save us. He believes that we can save ourselves.”
“And do you?”
Meoraq watched the clouds drift.
“I don’t know,” he said at last. “But I hope so.”
Jazuun grunted and labored himself back onto his feet. “I’ll start arranging audiences, I suppose. I’ll hold as many of them off as long as I can, but you’ll be seeing the first of them tonight, that’s as good as a promise, and you may never see the last.”
“I mark. You may as well begin with the exarch I had you confine for me,” Meoraq added. “He and I have unfinished business.”
Jazuun acknowledged this and retreated, leaving them alone together on the rooftop.
“What are you going to do to him?” Amber asked.
“I’m going to demand my oaths of office,” he replied distractedly, still gazing at the sky. “And I’ll probably make him my personal scribe for all my future dealings with the Oracles, at least until I’ve finished rewriting the Word, which should keep me occupied while I finish coughing out my wetlung and you and Uyane’s wife have more gowning parties.”
She bore up under that news well. “And then?”
“Then we go home. Where we would have gone even if the doors had opened on God Himself…or if they had never opened at all. We will go home. With God’s…” He trailed off, waiting to feel that hollow loss and feeling instead the sun’s warmth on his face and Amber’s hand twining with his. “With God’s favor and fair weather, we will be in Xeqor before the hottest days of the season come.”
“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”
“Yes,” he said. “Truth, all the reasons I had for coming here were answered long before now. I know I could stay here if I asked and I know the Oracles will probably push for it, but I want to go home. I want to see my child born behind the walls where I was born. I want to see my wife lying in my bed. I want to see my brothers again, even if it means I have to fight them a few times first. I want to go home, Amber, and I want to stay home when I get there.”
She leaned against his side in sympathy, then startled and gave him a sharp, wondering stare.
He noticed and shrugged his spines. “If there is no God, it doesn’t matter. If there is, surely He would want me to call my wife by her beautiful name. Amber.” He pinched her chin and leaned in to nuzzle at her. “My Amber. Come home with me.”
She cupped his face and kissed him back. “You know I will.”
“Do I?”
“Meoraq, if there had been a starship waiting there all fueled up and freshly-waxed just the way Scott wanted, I’d still be going home with you. Didn’t you know that by now?”
“Yes,” he said and nipped at her shoulder. “But I like to hear you say it.”
She stood up, hugging herself as she watched the sun sink over the mountains, setting the sky around it on fire. The first timekeepers began to ring the bells of tenth-hour and the rest quickly joined in. Kitchen smells began to ride the wisps of smoke leaking from the wind-ways. Somewhere on a neighboring section of the roof, music began to play: a celebration of life, a song of praise before God. “I really am sorry about your little knives,” Amber said.
“Eh, you saved me, didn’t you? Besides—” He patted her braid on his arm. “—I still have this to wear. And I have your cup.”
“And your tea box.”
“Then life is good. Help me.”
She took his arm and together they managed to get him on his feet. He took a moment to adjust to his weight and the way the world wanted to pull at it and then just looked at her.
“Life is good,” he said again, not without some weary surprise. “Isn’t it?”
She thought it over, her soft brow furrowed, frowning. “Yeah,” she said at last, and even huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah, I really think it is.”
He put out his hand. She took it and together, they left the roof. The sun slipped away, but the clouds kept burning, outlined in shocking shades of pink and blue. The clanging bells died and the music played on. The last hour of Gann ended, the hour of Uyane began, and in the east, the first star of evening came out.
THE END
September 2010 – September 2013
Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
Olivia
The Scholomance
Cottonwood
COMING SOON
Pool
Coming in 2014!
Pool
PROLOGUE
The Kuluzo Mountains in eastern Alaska have always been a dangerous place, but the low buckle of rock the white men called Mount Isaac was more dangerous, not because of the ice which cloaked its more impressive brothers in the Kuluzos, or the quakes that rocked so many of the mountains in that land, but because it was also a bad place. The Naiaksit Indians who made their homes in the dry forests at its feet called it “Chuatok”—the Hunger—and told tales of the restless and angry spirits who roamed there, of Wendigo whose wild song could make a man desire to feed on the flesh of other men, of the monstrous sons of Trickster who knew no welcome in heaven or on Earth. The whites came in their quest for gold, penetrating the wild places by the thousands in a mere handspan of years. They left a grave behind at the end of every day, but still they came and it was said of them by more than one mouth that no place was so haunted that the white men would not try to cut a pass through it or set a town atop it…but no pass was ever made across relatively small Mount Isaac, where no Indian guide of any tribe would go and no white scout ever returned. Chuatok hungered. Chuatok fed.
Nevertheless, in 1897, gold was found in that same Alaskan wilderness where Wendigo howled, and from that day, the white man inevitably came. Towns grew up fast even in dangerous places, around Mount Isaac at first, and finally, tentatively, atop it. Men vanished, but then, in such places when keeping only the untamed company of other impoverished and desperate fools, men will. Their lives were unremarkable. Their deaths were quiet.
Until Hodel in the summer of 1898.
The Hodel Mining Company boasted a great profit in that largely luckless year of the Klondike Rush, but then, the Hodel Mining Company did not dig for gold. Oh, they took it where they found it, and they did find it now and then, but the company’s interest lay in other minerals—“Industry minerals,” as the mine’s founder was so oft to say, with great emphasis and satisfaction on the first word—and, of course, in acquiring its discouraged and impoverished labor force as cheaply as possible. In the eight months since the mine’s opening, great quantities of lead and zinc had been pulled from the deep rock and shipped away down the rough road on the three-week trek to the railroad, as well as a few modest tons of silver and several crates of cinnabar (Hodel always accompanied those shipments himself, eschewing the luxury compartments aboard the train which he usually favored to sit, smoking and glowering, atop the crate containing the valuable ‘red mercury’). There were no Naiaksit left by then to warn them not to dig, and it is doubtful anyone would have listened if there had been. It takes terrible things to make a desperate man take warning, and Alaska in 1898 was filled with desperate men.
It began slowly, a mere trickle before the flood. Lone-wolf miners who had for years come in as regular as the rains to trade a tobacco-pouch of gold dust for a bath, a bottle, a box of bullets and one of Handsome Jack’s two-penny whores did not come in. The flint-eyed strangers suspected by many of claim-jumping and murder, vanished next, but no great loss. Some of the
men working the Hodel Company’s mine came up muttering to each other about noises they could not have heard down in the deepest shafts, described by some as “that clicking, ear-picking sound that bats make right up close”, or “a heavy, slithery sound, with claws”, or just, “breathing, real quiet, allus coming from behind-like”. Hodel did his best to put a stop to that noise, but when Miss Molly Slipper, highest-paid whore in camp at ten cents a throw, took herself out the door on a drunk and never came back, men started to leave. Only one or two at first, the soft-handed sort no one was particularly surprised to see the back end of in this wilderness, but then it was Calico Pike, working the deep end of the unfinished Shaft Six, who took his pick and a handcart down the Number Nine tunnel, let out a bellow, a curse and then a scream, and was gone by the time the other men in the morning crew took the necessary ten running steps to round the tunnel’s sharp turn. There was a new hole in the back wall where he’d been cutting, a cold breeze that blew out of it, three dollar-sized drops of blood just below it, and a sound receding into the black—that clicking, scraping, heavily-breathing, impossible sound.
A lot of men left then, and one of them was Handsome Jack Hodel, son and scion of Richard Hodel, founder of the Hodel Mining Company and owner of the Hodel Mine, the Hodel General Store, the Hodel Claim Registry, and the Hodel Traveller’s Rest (who proudly advertised beds, baths, and spirits, but not the women that brought in most of their trade). He left after listening to his father rant at his foremen for three and one-half hours about how there was nothing in those tunnels, nothing dragging burly miners away, and nothing for God’s sake eating them and gnawing on their mother-loving bones, so take these Christing things out right now and bury them before some superstitious damned fool sees them! He left, and he took as much as he could fit into a set of saddlebags with him, including $4700 in bills, $2200 in silver, all the cinnabar he could pocket, and the deed to Hodel itself, which was not really stealing, since he was his father’s only son, so far as anyone knew, and a man had an obligation to look after his inheritance.
Richard Hodel, a man who had never been accused of an overabundance of fatherly feeling, would almost certainly have hunted down his son and heir (and strung him up from the nearest tree, after putting a few holes in his gullet and a few boots to his bones, like as not), but he never had the chance. Every man who had not crept quietly away from Hodel before sundown that night (well before Handsome Jack’s escape had been noticed) was dead before sunup the next day. The work of claim-jumpers, said some, seeing overturned chairs, bloodsign, and the pitably light scores of human fingernails scratching across the hotel’s wooden floors. Bears, said others, because for all of that, there were no bodies to be found and buried. The Indians said nothing at all, but thought, perhaps, of restless spirits, Wendigo, and Trickster’s half-born abominations.
Either way, it was over and done, and so after the investigation (and the emptying of the mineral shed where everything Handsome Jack had not taken lay untouched by the murderous, claim-jumping bears of Alaska), all shafts leading into the mines were boarded over (the cage shafts, anyway, and whatever vent shafts the investigators stumbled across in their investigations), and Hodel was abandoned until the company decided what it wanted to do with the land. There was not much room for mystery as long as there was still gold in the mountains, but there was no gold on Mount Isaac and so the men were content to bury the truth of the Disaster with the mine and move on.
The Disaster had nothing to do with bears or monsters. In truth, it could not be said to have much to do with men either, as men reckon themselves.
But they were men once. Not a hundred years ago, or even a thousand, but at the very roots of mankind’s emergence. They were men when men lived in caves, made fire with stones, and still lived in fear of the world they would one day subjugate and master. They were men then, but the men came out of the caves. These went deeper inside. Both changed. And in 1898, when they met again, Hodel’s mining camp vanished. But it could be said that the people of Hodel remained, the new people, content to stay in their new home once the threat of other, of not-same, had been overcome and peace returned to their simple lives.
For they were peaceful, really. Not in the same way as humans now reckon peace, no more than they could be reckoned men, but in their own way, and it was peaceful enough. Men disappeared on the mountain from time to time—men who had no business being up there in the first place, men who were not much mourned or long missed—but there were no more Hodel Disasters. Gradually, some very ordinary murders and vanishings took its place. The gold gave out in the mountains. The mining companies collapsed and the towns built on their names were forgotten. If Handsome Jack had waited another hour and fifteen minutes before sneaking away on his father’s horse, or if he’d just left the deed behind and stolen one more bag of silver instead, Hodel might have been just another ghost town haunting the high unknown wilds of the Cascades, and things would have been different. Or if Jack had not been quite so quick to settle down with the first rich widow taken in by his good looks and frontier charm, or if a thousand things, culminating in if the wooden barrier capping the old Number Two pipe-shaft had never collapsed.
It had been a hundred and twenty years, almost to the very day, but the high, dry climate of the eastern face of Mount Isaac had preserved much. Quite a lot of debris had fallen in over that cap over the years, and countless animals had crossed over it without worry, but upon that unremembered anniversary, whatever restless and angry spirits dwelled in that hungry place surely guided the feet of William White, who had hunted the dry forest and panned its streams some fifty-odd years and who feared no man and no rotten timber. With one dry, dusty snap, Big Bill dropped one hundred six feet past rusted pulleys and mummified fibers of rope that had once hauled lead by the cage-load from the same mountain where he panned for gold. He actually landed pretty well, which was paradoxically unfortunate. He shattered his rifle, as well as most of the bones in the lower half of his body and lay alternately screaming for help and laughing at his own stupidity, watching his horrifically non-lethal wounds worsen and drinking what he had left of his day’s allotment of homebrew until the shock wore off. The rain that kept him chilled and helped his broken limbs to rot away kept him alive ten agonizing days more, and then he died. Forty days after that, give or take, a descendant of the creatures who had broken into the Hodel Company Mine from deeper parts unknown (a descendant, in fact, of the very one who had pulled Calico Pike to his unpleasant doom) followed the smell to this newly-opened portal and squinted up into the wet sky.
His name was Pool, a name which was meant to evoke the dark, deep waters that seemed so still but which teemed with unseen life. They were calling him Pool even when he was still a child and it was not an endearing name, for he’d had those dark, ungraspable thoughts even then and it unnerved the others. It unnerved them now too, but they accepted him better. He had become leader, a role that had always been and always would be needed in spite of their unchanging and essentially peaceful lives.
He had become leader, although no one could say exactly when or how. He had begun easing into the role even before the old leader’s death, so that when Bent Thumb did finally go to the Pit, no one questioned Pool’s right to take him there, not even Edges, who, as the biggest and strongest of them, would surely have been the one to assume leadership if Pool and his strange way of thinking had never come along.
The clan was smaller now than that which had first come to Hodel in the spring of 1898, but that was to be expected. It is an easy thing to die in a new place, particularly when there are monsters in your dark, safe tunnels, easiest of all to become frightened and flee back to the distant clan you left behind. But in the end, the mine had been boarded up, the camp abandoned, and with the memories of the monsters growing dim, the clan tentatively rooted themselves in this new soil and began to grow.
And they grew well. The tunnels were huge and relatively dry—any one of them could stand and walk upo
n their feet through any tunnel as far as it bored through the rock—but best of all, they were easy. The floors, walls, and even the ceilings were all flat, which was not only kind to hands and feet, but helped to catch sounds and bounce them back to waiting ears. The topmost tunnels where were the largest, but the clan rarely ventured there. True, it was where meat fell and where the air was freshest, but it was also coldest and damp and often filled with biting beams of Upworld’s light. The lowest tunnels, by comparison, had succumbed ages ago to the lack of a pump and yearly runoff into the nearby lake, and had almost entirely flooded out. Many new holes had opened under the water, and now fish and frogs and sometimes meaty things swam freely into the mine, so there was always something to eat even when no meat fell into the shafts.
They lived for the most part in the mid-levels of the mine, where the temperature stayed cooled year-round but never so cold that water turned hard. There were a few vent shafts here, if one traveled far enough, but most of the clan stayed close to the old track line, the great crossways of the Hodel mine, their hub of community. It was a good place, a strong place, nearly sixty feet by forty and adjoined by two other rooms half that impressive size. In 1898, the rough dome of the chamber was thirty-seven feet above the floor, but now it was scarcely half that and the many criss-crossing rails that had once brought Richard Hodel a half-ton of galena each day had been long buried under layers of animal hides. There was room enough for all of them in this place and they all used it, not only to sleep, but to hold whatever objects occupied their fleeting interests.