by Jordan Reece
The can sat untouched upon the stump, taunting Elario. Once the bullets were chambered, he fixed the can in his gaze. “What does it feel like to get hit with an aithra bullet?” he asked.
“What I have heard, Master Elario,” Hobbe said, “is that a human experiences a tremendous burst of energy exploding within him as the bullet comes apart at impact. It is so strong and painful of a jolt that he falls to the ground in paralysis for a short period of time. Though it is usually not fatal, to use an aithra bullet on someone weak of heart can be deadly. Are you weak of heart, sir?”
“No, Hobbe, I am in good health.”
“Then why do you lug about all of this herbal rubbish with you?” Westen complained from behind them. He had come outside with Elario’s satchel, the herbal case in his hand.
In aggravation at having his belongings pawed through, Elario lowered the pistol. “I am a midwife and healer, in addition to petty spice-gatherer and farmer. You do not know all of me just because you knew my uncle. I have learned to carry a measure of my medicines when I travel.”
“A midwife? You?” Westen said in disbelief. “What woman would wish you to kneel at her bedside?”
“A woman whose pain has gone on overlong is glad to see anyone who can relieve it. Return those herbs to my satchel.”
“We need the room for ammunition. There will be no babies where we are going.”
Elario stiffened. “There may be no babies, but there is always someone in need of healing, even perhaps myself, and I won’t be caught short.”
Westen’s brows lifted. “Far be it from me to criticize when we are in need of another box of bullets and you pull out a fistful of powder or an ointment to throw.”
“Thank you for understanding.”
“I believe that that was sarcasm,” Hobbe offered. “Master Westen always moves his eyebrows in that way before he tells me that he was being sarcastic.”
“Oh, for the grace of the gods,” Westen said to his mechanical man, shoving the herbal case into the satchel. “You reveal too much of me.”
Since the matter was settled, Elario returned to his pistol practice. Another missed shot earned him a scoff of derision from the blond mechanical man. In a temper, he shoved the eye patch up to his forehead, closed his left eye and narrowed his right, and pulled the trigger.
The can flew up into the air and vanished into the long grass. Hobbe clapped his shoulder with three equally weighted and perfectly timed pats. “Well done, sir!”
“Thank you, Hobbe. Did you teach Westen to shoot as well?” Elario asked only to needle, and felt a glare at his back.
“Oh, no, sir.” Hobbe walked through the grass to retrieve the can. “Master Westen is an expert marksman from long before I started to work for him.”
Elario had a biting remark on the tip of his tongue, but the dream or memory or whatever it was stilled his words. If the dragon’s eye gave him a memory of Westen’s youth, for that face had most assuredly been that of a young Westen, then how could he be mechanical? Mechanical beings began their manufactured lives as men and women; they did not grow from child to adult. Yet he could not be made of flesh either, for flesh did not live so long or survive a hanging, nor freeze at a physical state of under thirty years.
Hobbe replaced the can on the stump. There was a dent in its side from where the aithra bullet had struck it. As he stepped away, Elario took aim once more. Then he hesitated. Westen said something, but his voice retreated as if he was running at top speed away from Elario rather than standing stock still at a mere three paces.
A scene flashed into Elario’s mind, and he lowered the pistol to interrupt. “They are coming.”
“Tell me.” Westen’s face swam into view. “Now or in the past?”
“Now. The last of them are crossing that shambles of a bridge outside Kurchen. There are about twenty. The leader of the party is a Dragon of the Blood, and the rest are men in scuffs. They’ve seen our fresh tracks, and they’re coming fast.”
“Damn, damn, damn.” Westen thrust the satchel into Elario’s arms. “Hobbe, saddle the horses immediately!”
Hobbe ran for the horses as Elario and Westen raced around the side of the cabin to go inside. Jerking over a satchel, Westen filled it with boxes of ammunition. Elario looked from his own overfull satchel to the cans of food. He would not be parted from his herbs, but it was imperative that he carry food and water, and contribute to the bearing of ammunition. That could only be done if he sacrificed something. Pulling out his dirty scuffs, he set them aside and shoved boxes and cans and dripping flasks in their place.
Westen transferred his personal effects from the two-handled bag to the satchel he was loading, and closed it. Hobbe’s satchel was already packed with ammunition and cookware, folded shovels and other things.
“How did they know we were here?” Elario asked.
“You think too small.” Westen eyed the herbal case as it went in, but made no comment. “They may have large teams of searchers along every road, path, and deer trail from Drouthe to Reves and beyond. Do not underestimate what it is within your eye. It could end this world.”
Elario would not underestimate it if Westen would be so kind as to tell him the full weight of what it did. They went as one out the door, where their horses were saddled and waiting. Elario swung the heavy satchel onto his back and mounted the bay as Westen climbed upon his white. Hobbe brought the huge black gelding around the side of the cabin and hurried inside for his satchel.
Westen kicked his horse onto the path down the hillside. Then he drew the reins with a shake of his head. “We can’t make it to the crossing before we’ll be in their line of sight.”
Elario heard the distant thunder of hooves. Panic made his heart race. “Where should we go?”
Westen backed up his horse and turned into the drive. “To Sable. Nobody will be watching for you there. We can reach it before nightfall.”
“What is Sable?”
Riding past him, Westen said, “The Great Cities were not the only places destroyed by dervesh in the Troubled Times. Sable fell first. Lower your eye patch, Elario!”
Take shelter in a place that belonged to dervesh? That was an insane plan! Caught between two impossible choices, Elario lowered the patch and reined his horse to follow Westen.
The thunder of hooves grew louder as they circled the cabin. It was the fault of last night’s drizzle, which muddied the road a little so the horses left impressions. The dragon’s eye took over Elario’s sight and he flew down the hill to a boom town half the size of the others and twice as ramshackle, collapsing cottages on the slope and larger, gutted buildings at the base. There were the men arriving on horseback, an unfriendly, muscled lot casting wary eyes over the decrepit structures as they slowed to take in their surroundings. The road split, one fork going up the slope where this cabin stood at the top, and the second passing by the bottom of the hill and vanishing under a blanket of leaves. The Dragon of the Blood pointed several of his men to the path up the slope.
It would not be long before the cabin was discovered. Returning to himself, Elario held onto his pistol as he rode after Westen to the edge of the grass behind the cabin. Beyond it, the land was buckled at the crest of the hill, short trees growing at odd angles from the tossed plates of rooted earth.
Westen steered his horse deftly through it. It was not the first time that he had traveled away from the cabin along this route. Swiftly he ferried them to a thin strip of hardened earth which went down the far side of the hill. The trees were so thickly packed in the valley below and upon the smaller hills around this one that even the lack of leaves on the snarled branches did not permit much view of the land.
Their descent from switchback to switchback was slow and perilous. The horses’ hooves dislodged pebbles, which tumbled down the slope only inches to the side of the trail. The dragon’s eye settled into peace beneath the patch, supplying neither visions nor voices nor knowledge, nor a pull to nearby dragon remains. There
were none over here, not that that was important.
The trail that was hardly a trail continued below the hill, so overrun in detritus that at times it disappeared. Trees extended their branches over it, growing together into knots. Although he was as fearful of dervesh as he was of these men, Elario put away his pistol. Westen’s posture was relaxed upon his horse, which he kicked to a fast trot. Clearly the dervesh of Sable were unable to travel this far, and nobody could shoot at them through the canopy.
A cry cracked overhead. Jerking in the saddle, Elario caught a brief glimpse of the hilltop. Two men were on foot up there, and shouting excitedly to their company. The Dragon of the Blood on horseback appeared a moment later, barking orders that the breeze doused.
They would not be able to descend that hill any faster than Elario, Westen, and Hobbe had. Holding onto that thought for comfort, Elario ducked under low branches and turned with the trail as it wandered through the valley. At last it delivered them to a slope that curved hard to the right. Climbing it, they soon lost sight of that hilltop altogether.
This hillside was as buckled as it had been behind the cabin, like a second hill was attempting to grow up beneath this one and force its way through. The trail was the only safe place to travel, but even so it was barely safe, old mudslides having washed it out so that they had to dismount several times to guide the balking horses over. Worse appeared at another turn, where erosion disintegrated the trail into a gash that scored the hillside. They dismounted again to lead the horses down to the base of the gash, and back up to where the trail resumed.
“They’re making good time,” Elario said in worry once they were mounted. He was unaware that he had slipped into a viewing of their pursuers until it was over.
“We’re about to make better,” Westen said, nodding ahead to where the trail dipped down to a flat sprawl of grass.
It stretched out for a quarter-mile to where the woods continued. High over the treetops was a stone watchtower. That had to be Sable. In dread, Elario kicked his horse to a run after Westen’s.
A shout and pistol crack split the air. For a terrified moment, Elario believed that Westen or Hobbe had shot a dervesh, a dervesh that Elario had not even seen. But the shot was from behind them. The soldier and his men were reining their horses off the trail to skid down the rest of the hill as a short-cut to the grass. Clouds of dirt flew up, shielding their two parties from one another.
A commanding voice pierced through the brown haze. “In the name of the king, you are ordered to stop!”
Breaking into the woods, they raced through them. Elario did not look behind himself again to check on the danger they were escaping; his attention had to be upon the danger they were approaching. The trees stopped in an abrupt line, and then they were in what was once a noble garden.
In its time, Sable was no boom town. A circular arcade with wide arches still stood, its columns cloaked in vines. Sculptures had fallen to the earth from marble pedestals. An arm lifted up to the heavens with an apple in its smooth marble palm, the rest of the body lost in green; another statue had toppled at an angle upon a column of the arcade, the dancing woman holding a fold of her skirt and smiling up to nothing.
If the manor to grace this property had been as grand as the garden, it could no longer be told from the colossal mountain of rubble. It looked like a giant had taken a hammer to it, smashing and smashing until no piece larger than a brick remained. They rode between the arcade and the mounds of the destroyed home.
An apparition of white flew out of the rubble, its speed so rapid that Elario had barely registered its presence before it was nearly to his horse. Westen threw out his arm and shot the dervesh, who was still disintegrating even as the pistol cracked to shoot the second apparition suddenly behind it. “They always come in twos,” Westen called out casually. “Come along! We’ll shelter at the tower.”
Perhaps it had not been so unwise for Hobbe to steal three horses of the Red Guard. They remained fairly calm at the noise of the pistol. The bay flicked an ear, which was the extent of her expression of displeasure. Were Elario less spooked, he would have patted her.
A paved road through flower-filled fields took them away from the destroyed property. Their horses swerved into the grass to get around a knot of crashed carriages, and they were unable to return to it when the road beyond the vehicles was broken. That giant’s hammer had done its work here, too, and taken gouges out of the crumbling structures ahead.
They could not be here! Dear Elequa, there was not a drop of madcap in Elario’s blood. He had no desire to dig about the rubble or enter those homes, or to stick his head into the carriages and root about for treasure. All he wanted was to hide in the tower, which hovered over the treetops not far away. Or, better yet, quit Sable as fast as possible.
Evening was dropping down quickly as they came to an untouched road and followed it deeper into the city. Elario’s head swiveled fearfully from side to side through several blocks of abandoned commerce. Here the streets were generously sized, and paved in white stone flecked in blue. Many of the individual stones were carved with a flower, an irrelevant observation that he castigated himself for making when he had to watch for dervesh.
Westen turned onto a road that was blocked off with stone markers to prevent carriages from entering. The tower was halfway down the block, accessible by a wide flight of stairs that lifted from the road to its open door. The structure was not whole, which was a dismaying sight. The third story was smashed apart on one side. The stones had fallen onto the stairs, breaking them in places, and upon the roof of the neighboring inn. At their weight, they had gone down all the way to the ground floor to settle there.
Westen kicked his horse to drive it right up the stairs. He rode through the doorway and into the tower, Elario and Hobbe entering seconds later. It was so dark within that Elario had to pause for his eye to adjust. Two sets of feet dropped to the floor, the mechanical men fighting to close the door of heavy wood. It groaned but complied, and Hobbe slid over the metal bolt to barricade them in.
“How do you know there are no dervesh in here?” Elario hissed, dismounting as Hobbe activated his forehead light.
“I don’t,” Westen said, scanning the room. “It’s just one of the very few buildings left in Sable that’s relatively intact and somewhat defensible.”
The room was shaped in a perfect circle. Devoid of windows, the walls were layered in rags of tapestries. A table was cleaved in half beneath a stone staircase, which ran up to the second floor. Weak light shined down from there. Dirt had blown in through the open door, grass and little flowers sprouting from it around Elario’s feet.
“This used to be Sable’s finest gallery of art,” Westen said, gesturing to an empty frame between two tapestries. “One was served refreshments upon this level, and then took the stairs to view the work of the most amazing artists above. You could bankrupt yourself on a painting, as some lords did.”
Elario was the only one with rattled nerves; Hobbe was incapable of the emotion, and Westen viewed the threat of dervesh as an unpleasant task to be accounted for and taken care of. However, this did little to put Elario at ease.
But he did not want to be the coward of their company, and concealed it. “Sable was not on the maps I studied as a boy.”
“So the city ceases to exist,” Westen said, walking around the room to inspect it from every angle. “There are hot springs in Sable that were the favorite of nobles. This was the destination for an upscale holiday, and recuperation for the ailing.” He nudged aside a tattered tapestry to ensure nothing was lurking behind it. “Hobbe, leave the saddles on the horses but give them some water. I’ll check for dervesh upstairs.”
“Yes, sir.”
Westen took the stairs in confident leaps. Elario went up after him, dust rising with every footfall. Crashing about on the second floor, Westen said merrily, “Come out, come out, wherever you are! Time to die so that you might be born again, you filthy, crusted perversions.”
Elario peered into another circular room. Westen was kicking over painted partitions, whirling about in a mad dance with his pistols. Windows ran the length of the circle upon this floor, all of them with a seat for two below. Another staircase went up to the third story. As part of it was open to the elements, Elario felt the moving breeze upon his face.
He crossed to a window and brushed aside the cobwebs. There were the steps below, and a row of buildings in disrepair across the road of flower-carved paving stones. The blue flecks were gone now; evening was bleaching colors to gray, but he still saw that the carvings on the individual stones formed a greater flower. It was only visible to this perspective.
“Were you ever here?” he asked. “Before?”
The last partition crashed down. “Yes,” Westen said, ceasing his dance. “Once.”
Then Elario saw Sable as it had been, the world brightening under a flush of sunlight. The air stirred in the gallery, nobles sipping from flutes of champagne and speaking in low voices as they walked behind Elario to the stairs. Across the road, the doors to game houses swung open and shut. Umbrellas crowded the street to ward off the hot sun, couples strolling arm in arm, a nanny in a white cap chasing a wayward toddler. And there was that boy who was sent from the kitchen for spices, that boy with Westen’s eyes and features, trotting behind an old nobleman and noblewoman with a hatbox tucked under his arm. Westen was much older here, at least fourteen, and his hair had darkened.
The old woman inclined her head to the gallery. Young Westen started up the steps after the couple, but the man stopped him with a shake of his head. He was to wait outside for now. He did so agreeably, sitting with the hatbox on a post at the bottom of the railing. His feet kicked with the beat of the music emanating from one of the game houses.
The railings were gone now, but the post was still there. The yawning doorways to those once bustling game houses were dark. Then there was a scream far away, and the rapid cracking of pistols.
“Fools,” Westen mumbled. With Elario lost in a memory, Westen had joined him at the window. “So they dared to enter these haunted grounds.”