by Kaden, John
“There’s someone here,” she breathes.
Jack draws his knife on the huddled form. “Who are you?” he asks, rattling forward with his blade.
“Hold! Hold!” the man says, his voice ragged and shaky. “I won’t hurt you.” Jack pauses and tightens his grip on the knife handle. “You killed that man,” the stranger says. “You’re not… a part of them?”
“Not anymore,” says Jack, struggling to comprehend what is happening.
The stranger gasps. “You’re running.”
“Tell me who you are or I’ll kill you right now.”
“I’m the man they’re looking for.”
“I don’t…”
“Look here, boy,” he says, and points down to his leg. Even in the murky darkness Jack can see the white shinbone glistening, a compound fracture, black blood pooling around his foot. “Fell coming down here. I’m done for. And so are you if you stay with me, the dogs are on my scent.”
“They’re coming, there’s nowhere to go,” Lia says in a panic, gulping air.
“Do they know you’re gone?” the stranger asks.
“I don’t know,” says Jack, analyzing his situation freshly. “Maybe… they don’t.”
“Maybe is good enough. I think I can help you get away, but you have to do something in return.”
“What are you talking about?” Jack can hear voices descending the bluffs. They are not far off now.
“I want you to go somewhere and give them a message.” He pulls a tattered scrap of leather from his shirt and thrusts it forward. “It’s a map. You’re here,” he points to a corner of land jutting out from the coast, “and I come from here,” he moves his finger down the map and etches a scribbled star. “Go there and warn them. Tell them that Ethan and Renning are dead. Tell them Nezra knows about Alexandria.” He scrawls the message on the back of the map.
“What is Alexandria?”
“A place worth dying for. I don’t have time to say more, but if you go you’ll understand. They can answer your questions. Go there and warn them,” he speaks rapidly, “and if you swear this to me, I’ll do what I can to get you out of here safely. At least for now. Will you go? Tell me now.”
“Where are we again?” Jack asks as he takes the map.
“Here. And you’ll be going south, which is this way. Can you read?”
“Some.”
“Good. Will you go?”
Jack looks to Lia and she is dazed with fear. She nods yes.
“We’ll go.”
“What are your names?”
“Jack.”
“Lia.”
“I’m Ethan.”
He pulls himself up, dragging his wasted leg behind him.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to let them catch me. When they stop the search and clear out, run south as fast as you can.”
“Thank you,” says Lia.
“Just don’t break a promise to a dead man.”
He hops out of the shrouded recess, then drops to his knees and crawls along the ledge toward the encroaching voices.
“There—”
“There he is.”
“Get the hell off me.”
Jack and Lia hold stock still as the violent frenzy ensues. The men strike Ethan’s damaged leg, and he screams so shrilly that Lia nestles closer to Jack’s side and buries her face in his shoulder.
“What is that?”
“I killed your friend,” Ethan says, and there is another sharp crack and then silence.
Dark shapes lurk past the alcove and cast their light on Braylon.
“Dead.”
They drag his body back the way they came and join the others, still binding the unconscious Ethan. Murmurs and footsteps continue on for so long a time that Jack is sure they’ll search deeper and find the two of them cowering in the shadows. He takes the shallowest breaths his lungs will allow and sits holding Lia for the longest time, feeling like the night will never end.
In due course, the warriors take their prisoner and their fallen brother and move south along the bluffs to the spot where they descended. After they’ve gone, Jack and Lia sit motionless for another span of time, terrified to move, convinced there must be one last man lying in ambush just outside ready to slice them.
Ever so slowly, Jack leans forward and peers out. They’re gone. He sits back and holds Braylon’s boot up to his own foot. Braylon’s are a bit larger and he switches his out and gives them to Lia.
“Put these on.”
They lace their boots, then Jack shoves everything in his pack and slides the satchel of arrows over his shoulder along with the bow and steps out onto the ledge with his knife drawn. Lia pokes out behind him and they move with caution along the westward face, toward the ruins.
They pass the steep incline the warriors used to reach the grounds and they hear harried voices off in the distance by the Temple. Crouching low, they move on down the hill that leads to the valley below, spiny bushes and dry weeds scratching at them as they go. Lia’s foot slides away and Jack catches her with his free arm and they cut an impromptu switchback down the steepest part of the hill. At last the grade levels off and they pick up pace, wending their way through the collapsed wreckage and racing off on their southern course. A thin sliver of moon casts a pale nimbus over the ruins and the air is still. The Nezran Temple fades into the distance, and soft footfalls tattoo the night as Jack and Lia escape into the untamed wilderness.
Chapter Eight
In the high cloistered dormitory, a group of new boys crowds around the thin window, squeezing together in a heap and craning their necks to see the action unfold on the grounds. They watch breathlessly as the unconscious man is dragged across the garden, his leg bent wickedly askew. When the eruption began, they had thought with heartbreaking naiveté that perhaps someone had come to rescue them.
Calyn huddles with her husband in their cottage, his fighting days long since gone, and they look out their own small window at the goings-on. They invoke the spirits of the Beyond and whisper devotions to their King’s divine protection—swearing off the Rain of Fire and saying their due should it all come crashing down.
Jeneth holds little Mariset close and rocks her gently. Eriem escorted them to Sena’s cottage to stay through the night, before suiting himself up and joining the hunt. Sena wraps an arm around each toddler and they sit in silence, gazing up at the ceiling as if waiting for a squall to pass. Such is the way across the hillside, frightened denizens cowering in darkened rooms, waiting for the spark that will ignite their downfall.
As the night grows quiet they venture out to see that their Temple is not burning, that whatever trouble had assailed them is dealt with and all crises apparently averted. The unsettled men keep watch through the dark hours, pacing the grounds and chattering nervously about the unknown origins of these intruders, speculating as to their intentions and wherewithal. They look to the Temple’s crown and whisper solemn wishes that their sacred protections have not been revoked.
Arana watches from above, silent and still. All candlelight around him has been extinguished and he stands in darkness, frozen in place since the chaos began. His breath is racing and he attempts to control it, his mind a swirl of confused thoughts. No premonition has foretold the arrival of these midnight prowlers, no vision or wisp of vision, nothing to portend the events he has just witnessed with his own sparkling spirit eyes. He opens himself as a willing vessel and bades the forces lingering in his very blood to show themselves.
The night answers with silence.
On shaky legs he snakes down to the underground keep, steadying his hand along the wall, averting the concerned looks of the men that escort him. In the antechamber he hears the suffering of the chained prisoners, and when he passes the heavy keep door he sees them—one old, one young. Ropy strings of drool hang from their mouths, their bodies covered with welts and lacerations, and Keslin stands to the back, ministering new abuses for his men to perform.
“Who are they?” Arana asks.
“Trying to find out,” Keslin says, flushing with exhilaration. “They won’t speak a word. Found them just past the tree line. Spying on us.”
“Spying?”
Keslin hands over the parchment. Arana unfolds it and stares in terrified wonderment at the finely sketched layout of the Temple and surrounding provinces. Bold letters inked across the top read NEZRA.
His blood runs cold. An interminable silence passes as Arana looks from parchment to prisoners and back again.
“We can add two horses to the stable,” Keslin says optimistically. “They were tied a ways back in the woods. Here’s the rest of their things—we’ve been through it… this little drawing is all we’ve found.”
The clothing is scattered across the back of the keep. Arana sifts through the garments numbly, casting aside the boots and packs and belts and toolkits. He picks up a torn jacket and lays it out flat. There is something disturbingly familiar about the odd tailoring—the seam line at the shoulders, the tapered cut. It has been years, not since his childhood days, but he has seen craftwork like this before.
Frantic footsteps rush down the stairs and a breathless sentry bursts into the keep and shatters the stillness.
“We finished our head count,” he says, panting. “We’re missing two.”
“Who?”
“One girl gone from her room, and the east guard is not at his station.”
They blink around at one another, dumbstruck, until all eyes eventually settle on the King. He tries to form a sentence but his dry, clumsy tongue forbids him and his jaw simply drops open and hangs slack.
Keslin is the first to move. He advances on the prisoners and wrings his hands around Renning’s neck, crunching his crooked old thumbs into his windpipe.
“If you’ve hurt them…” he seethes. Renning’s eyes bulge in confusion and his face turns a deeper shade of purple. He releases Renning and clutches onto Ethan. “Or maybe it was you? You’ve already killed one of ours. Where are they?”
Ethan’s head lolls to the side and he mumbles unintelligible nonsense. Keslin grabs a stout length of wood from a pile and slams it into his broken leg. Ethan’s eyes sharpen to fine points and he wails so fiercely the sound carries up the stairs and into the foyer, resonating through the whole structure like an enormous woodwind. His cries shrivel away and he passes out again, his shocked body quivering and rattling his shackles.
“He killed… one of ours?” Arana asks. “Here? At the Temple?”
“On the bluffs. Braylon’s body is upstairs.”
Arana’s mind reels.
“Let’s go,” says Keslin, already lurching toward the stairs.
They break for the upper levels and run to the vaulted overpass that connects the Temple with the dormitory, then fan out down the off-shooting corridors with Keslin charging after, shouting orders.
Arana walks to the center of the high bridge and looks out across the calm waters of the reflecting pool, his consummate protections come to naught, his lifelong streak of Temple harmony shattered to pieces—the evidence of his failure lying on a cold slab in the Temple morgue.
Almost immediately a frenzy of hollers from the furthest corner draws him away and he strides down the hall toward the warriors collected at the narrow service entrance. A path is cleared for Arana and Keslin and the stifled moaning from behind the pantry door quickens their pace. They arrive just as the door is battered once more, busting the wood plank at the hinges and throwing it open with a loud crack.
Bound and disoriented on the floor is their missing sentry, his scalp coated with dried blood and his mouth muzzled with rope.
When he’s undone he sits for a moment and takes several long, deep breaths. Then he pours forth. Arana listens in stunned silence as the account unfolds, his pulse throbbing in his eardrums. The heaviness deepens when they find the soggy torch in the sink and the cabinet of knives standing wide open, with two slots empty.
As dawn breaks, Jack and Lia push forward. They ran through the night and they run still, holding hands so tightly their knuckles have turned white. At streams they stop and fill the waterskin, and along the way they pluck berries and a few less desirable things to chew on as they flee through the dense underbrush.
Jack looks behind for any sign of the Nezra, or anything else that might be stalking them, for the forests are teeming with carnivores. It’s clear as far as he can see and they carry on. They follow the map and keep the coast to their right hand side, and as they make more ground their panic and fear turn slowly into exultation.
A rough, dizzying climb takes them to a high tableland that overlooks the coastal cliffs far to the south and north, a landscape so prehistoric and majestic that for a moment they forget their worries and gape like mystified newborns at the wild, unknown frontier. Sun-dappled mesas recede off into the luminescent haze, rolling and cresting, the product of untold aeons of the earth’s churning. The cliffs drop off sheer down into the yawning ocean, which spills out so far and wide that Jack and Lia feel at once minuscule and enormous, like tiny sprites standing on the shoulder of some ancient god.
They come together, and if one could amplify this sight to the finest grain it would be impossible to perceive which of them moved first to embrace the other.
“Jack, we made it!”
As they cling to each other, the years they spent in exile fall away and they pick up easily, despite all that has passed, and even though she is a new Lia, and he knows that he is a new Jack, it is as though they were never separated. The moment lingers and the elixirs of the wild seep into their worn souls and they feel something dry and brittle begin to crack open.
As they part, Jack looks along the northern coast and off in the faraway he sees the smoke of the Temple.
“We have to keep moving,” he says, “they’ll know we’re gone by now.”
Down the hill they run, into the emerald green hollow, dots of red and purple wildflowers blooming around them. A few unnatural shapes jut from the earth at odd angles, vestigial remnants of a world they never knew. They stay clear of open spaces when they can, using the ivy-covered slabs of old stone as cover in case any mounted searchers rise over the plateau behind them. Jack peers through a few intact windows at the decomposing scrap metal arranged inside—a dreary tableau of loss and ruin, home now to things that slither and crawl.
A stream runs through the fold of the valley, a mossy boulevard of burbling water and glossy stones, and he guides Lia down to its thin bank.
“Here, take off your boots.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Let’s walk upstream awhile and cross over, maybe we can cover our scent. They’ll have the wolves after us and we can’t move fast enough to outrun ‘em.”
Lia needs no further motivation—she sits on the bank and pulls off her stiff leather boots and steps into the bracing stream. She sinks into the mud. The soft putty feels good between her tired toes and the cool water washes over her feet. Jack walks a false trail off the other side of the stream then shuffles backwards and splashes in behind Lia and they trek along against the lazy current. The foliage thickens as they move inland and the bows of green-leafed oak trees sway languidly above them, shading them from the midday sun and giving cover from the high ground.
Jack clambers up a low, rocky waterfall and Lia scales up behind him. They step carefully around collected limbs and branches and slosh through deepening water, rising almost to their knees. Jack looks hungrily at the slippery trout that mingle around the stream and dart and scatter as their footsteps plunk down in the mud. He makes futile snatches at a couple of them and they slip lithely from his fingertips and race away.
His movements are slowing. They need rest. Neither of them has slept since the night before and exhaustion is setting in.
When the coast is gone from view they leave the stream and sit wiping the mud off their feet with fallen leaves, then lie back on the sloping bank and let the s
un dry them, feeling like they could pass right out and sleep the whole day through. They tie their boots on and hike through the woods until they find an outcropping of boulders.
Jack grabs a thick branch and sweeps away a corner, looking for snake holes and other things that might intrude upon them. He’d rather make more distance but his thoughts aren’t clear and their pace has slowed to a crawl. They scatter nettles and dry leaves, then nestle back in the enclave and pull more branches up around them. It’s not much, but it is enough, and as they sink into the matting and curl together, sleep steals them quick.
Halis sits atop his horse at the edge of the summit that borders the Temple’s lush gardens, looking out over the senescent valley with the straight-backed posture of regal austerity. He grins with slow malice. His face is a mask of lopsided disfigurement. Six other riders await their orders next to him, called to find the runaways. The wolfmongrels snarl and gnash against their leathery leads, flicking their golden brown eyes around with icy cleverness, and the mounted wranglers struggle to hold them back.
Keslin walks down the line and inspects each member of the search brigade—seven mongrels, seven horsemen. They wear looks of hard-set resolution. Keslin’s own visage is grim from the further revelations that first light had brought. The rope dangling over the edge of the bluffs, the sooted handprints along the Temple’s outer walls—and the perplexity of Braylon’s body found with no boots or weapons has seemingly explained itself—the prisoners in the keep can at least be exonerated of murder.
Keslin steps to the front of the brigade and addresses them. “Kill the boy, return the girl. Separate if you lose the scent. Do not return until you’ve found them.” He gives a nod and they set forth, hauling off after the snapping wolfmongrels.
The grounds are largely empty save for them. Most stay inside, behind barred doors, lest there be any more outsiders conducting spywork in the forest. He hobbles back toward the Temple, silver blood coursing through his veins. Arana and Ezbeth wait under the portico in the center of the enormous entryway, watching keenly as the horsemen and wolfmongrels descend from view.