by Kaden, John
He hunts no food and builds no fire. He does not even pile nettles underneath him to make a softer mat. He simply closes his eyes and lets the delirium take him into blackness, uncertain as to whether or not he will ever wake up again.
When the night sky lightens to gray, the raccoons come home. They shamble up the earthen ramp, single file, like a little work crew returning from the mines. Two hollow-eyed adults touch their skinny snouts to the floor of the entrance and sniff around. They crane their necks and peer inside with worried faces—Someone has been here. Three little kits bound up the ramp and thump into them, then scamper past and run inside, cooing and rolling around on the debris, gnawing on sticks and slapping at worms on the ground. The adults let out a trilling chitter and the kits ignore them and cavort obliviously.
Lia sits bolt upright and watches the shapes move about in the gray dawn. “Wake up.”
“Hmm?” Jack raises his head and blinks around, trying to adjust his vision.
The two plump adults move onto the marble countertop and surmise the forms huddling in the corner. They leer at them peevishly with their black-ringed eyes. One of the kits holds a millipede in its little black fingers and chews it sloppily and stares at Jack.
Jack feels around for the machete.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m starving.”
“You’re going to kill them?”
“One of them.”
“You can’t!”
“I thought you were tired of eating bugs.”
“I am, but… they’re cute.”
Jack sighs and looks into her eyes, dark and glossy in the shadows. “All right,” he concedes, “but don’t blame me if you get hungry.”
She smiles coyly. Soft orange light filters through the haze and the morning brightens ever so slightly. Lia sits up and stretches her arms and a deep yawn overcomes her. The little family on the countertop watches her intently, and when her mouth opens wide and shows its teeth they lurch off the counter and scramble quickly away to their darkened, brushed-over hideout.
“Huh,” says Jack, “they looked at you and got scared away.”
She slumps her shoulders and rolls her eyes toward him. Jack smiles and grabs the long blade and stands beaming in the doorway, looking out at the sunrise.
“Bear,” he says. The massive tracks zigzag around their shelter.
“What.”
“Last night. It was a bear that went by. Big one.”
“That doesn’t make me feel any better.”
She takes her spear and jogs lithely down the ramp and turns in a slow circle to get a full view of their whereabouts. Whimsical old lodgings from time out of mind. Cobbled stone buildings that would have befitted a lord’s fiefdom in some other millennium. It lay on the crest of a smooth green hill, overlooking the misty purple valleys around it like a rotted fairy tale kingdom.
“Where are we?”
Jack ventures down the winding avenue a ways, toward a three-story villa covered with a ropy tangle of kudzu. Brown moss coats the old stone like velvet. He leans over a tall arched window and looks inside. It is cleared of rubbish and thick furs lay scattered about the clean-swept floor. More signs of humanity in the corner, piles of hides and wooden tools, kindling and firewood stacked against the opposite wall. Jack’s heart begins to pound.
Lia saunters up behind him and reads the courtly lettering chiseled in above what looks to be the entrance. “Olde… World… Inn… What does that mean?”
“I think there’s people living here. We have to go. Now.”
She snaps her head around instinctively and her knuckles go white around the spear shaft. The streets here are far from straight—they curve around haphazardly and make oddly angled intersections. Their sightlines are limited every way they look, shrouded by buildings and imposing oak trees that block the passages like weathered old gatekeepers. They see no one.
“Here,” says Jack, “this way.”
They stalk along the exterior of the Inn, stepping lightly, trying not to crunch the gravel beneath their boots and give away their presence. There is a sharp caw from the other side of the street and a flock of crows lights off from the leaning belfry of an old church. Jack jerks his head around and watches them flap away. Still no people, and he starts to wonder if he’s overreacting. Just as the thought crosses his mind, they see campfire smoke rise from behind a steep vaulted structure that stands directly ahead of them. They freeze at the corner of a three-way intersection and watch the smoke float skyward above the pointed roof, then motion catches their attention from the next corner down and they spot a few figures shambling across the street. A young man, barely older than Jack, carries a coyote carcass in his arms and an older heavy-set woman leads three goats along on leashes. Two rough-bearded men follow, each with long, stout bows over their shoulders. The woman laughs, and the men soon join her. Jack follows their motions until they disappear down the obscured side street. Friendly or not, he isn’t interested in lurking around their territory lest it bring about a test of their marksmanship. His machete would do little against them.
Lia spots an escape. “There—“
On the far side of the intersection, a narrow alley cuts off the main avenue and runs between a sturdy little tavern and a tilted framework with a few clapboard panels still clinging after all these years.
They find the right moment in each other’s eyes and bolt across the street together. They can see wisps of flame from the campfire through wreckage to their left, with many figures passing in and out of view. They look like simple people, the sort that Jack and Lia grew up with. They pause for the slightest of moments and watch them, each feeling a pang of desire to go be with them. To roast meat and laugh around a fire. To be with family, even if the family is someone else’s. A mongrel starts barking.
“Baron, shut up!”
The barking intensifies.
Jack and Lia skid around the corner, into the thin alley, and angle sideways between the shrubs and stunted trees that grow down the entire length. The mongrel must have been loosed because its baying draws closer.
“Baron, get back here!”
Jack and Lia reach the end and burst out onto another large, serpentine avenue. They hear the brush moving behind them and they hear the fevered panting, and they raise their weapons in anticipation, ready to strike at the snarling mongrel when it emerges.
Soon enough it does, and Jack looks quizzically upon it and does not strike. It is a dumpy gray thing with stubby legs and a short snout. Not the sort he’s used to encountering, but what it lacks in size it compensates for with zealotry. It barks at them so strenuously it risks convulsion, and they lower their guard.
“Shut up,” Lia hisses, and the creature rears back and growls from the very depths of its stunted bosom.
“Hey!” shouts a hardened old-timer. He draws his bow around and fumbles with an arrow. “Baron, get the hell away from ‘em.”
The old man clumps down the way, with his elbow drawn back and cocked at a high odd angle, ready to let go the arrow. He looks like he’s making a spectacle of the weapon more than anything, and the boy at his side watches his actions and mimics them with his own small bow.
Jack sneaks a look over his shoulder and sees them coming, albeit not very fast. He snatches the runt mongrel up by the scruff of his neck and the little body goes slack in his hand. He licks his black lips and whimpers, working his wide round eyes back and forth between them.
“Shhh.” Jack swats him on the rear. “Quiet.”
Baron lick his chops again, humiliated. He risks another feeble growl and Jack shushes him again.
“Get ready to run,” he says. He sidles closer to the edge of the brick wall and sees the old man hobbling toward him, then flings Baron out onto the avenue. He lands with his four paws splayed out on the ground and skids into a barrel roll, then jumps up and counters around in fitful circles, trying to gain his bearings.
Jack and Lia sprint down a long, strai
ght thoroughfare that cuts down the hill and away from the strange old village. They are laughing by the time they reach the bottom.
“That was the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
Lia doubles over behind a boulder with her hand over her mouth. “I thought we were gonna die,” she giggles. “Ooh—are they following us?” Her smile drops and she spins around and squints up the hill.
The old man stands at the top of the rise.
“Stay way from here,” he shouts in no particular direction. “Better not a stole nothin’.”
A smile cracks on Lia’s face again and she plunks down on the ground. “What should we do?”
“Wait for him to go away, I guess.”
“Do you think they would’ve killed us?”
“Probably not, but… you never know.”
“I’ll bet they’re nice.”
“You always think that. Even if they were, they still might’ve shot at us. Sajiress did.”
“Mmm. True.”
“Are they gone?”
“There’s two of them talking now. They’re looking down the other way, though. Oh wait… there they go, I think they’re leaving.”
Jack pops up and looks after them. When they’re out of sight he takes Lia’s hand and ventures down through the rest of the town. The outlying areas are not of stone and the structures that once stood have moldered into the earth and given birth to sturdy new trees with roots that snake down over the mounds. Jack’s stomach gurgles and he wishes he had a fresh, warm raccoon slung over his shoulder. He settles for berries and grub worms.
Along the way, he fetches dark gray rocks off the ground and strikes them against the back edge of his machete, then pitches them away.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking for flint.”
“What’s it look like?”
He seizes up a rock. “Kind of like this.” He strikes it against the metal. “But not.”
They carry on and keep a swift pace through the day, even as every step sends a sharp sting into their feet. Lia hands him rocks from time to time, and Jack keeps striking them until one finally sparks.
Their spirits lighten considerably as they drift southward, and as dusk sets in they make a little camp next to a burbling stream. Jack wades into the water with the spear and skewers some food while Lia strolls across the forest floor and snatches sticks and limbs for firewood.
They spark the tinder and the small fire takes hold. They use little tonged sticks to hold their fish out over the flames and they sit studiously and watch them cook.
Neither says a word until they’ve finished eating, the simple daily act has taken on sacred importance of late. When they’ve licked the tines of their sticks clean Jack casts them away from their camp, then digs out a couple divots with his machete and drives stout, upright limbs into the holes. He ties off a third limb across the top with stripped vinery and they lean leafy branches against it and make a little shelter and crawl inside. He lies on his back and Lia nestles close to his side, facing the fire. She narrows her eyes and stares deeply into the flames.
“So… what do you think it knows, this place? It can’t be just building things and growing food and all that. We knew most of that back home, enough of it to live anyway. There has to be… something else… but what?”
Jack is quick with an answer. “They know about the world, I think. How it burned and everything.”
“Is that why the King wants it?”
“I think so.”
“So he can destroy it?”
“So he can steal it for himself. He fears whatever they know, and he wants it because he’s afraid of it, because he wants to be the one who’s feared.”
“What if he gets there?”
“I just hope they’re stronger than he is. Much as he says he wants to keep the world from burning, I know pretty well he’s lying. So do you.”
The Temple stands atop a sea of fog like an enormous turret. Silent gray mist overlays the valley and ocean and seals itself against the bluffs, isolating them from the great wide world, and only the broad prominence of the grounds and the provincial hillsides are visible above it. At the edges of this ominous barrier stands a formation of warriors. They glower into the vast gray obscurity, their faces betraying a fear that perhaps some abomination may arise from it, as if the very fog itself might assemble, absent the ways of nature, into an army of wayward ghosts with swords of vapor and come marching across the plateau to do battle.
Their ranks have grown as the crews are called back from the quarry, and old men who’ve withdrawn from service don their warrior’s attire once more and arm themselves for the coming storm. They stand at all points of entry and exit, and they watch.
Halfway up the hillside, a creaky cottage door opens and Jeneth steps out onto the gravel path. Pairs of eyes surveil her movements steadily, from one station to the next. She holds her baby in her arms and walks with her head down—the warriors’ intrusive stares writhe and linger on her skin. She felt welcomer here years ago, when she was first carried into the Temple in her filthy wooden cage. So much has changed. Her eyes are red-rimmed and bloodshot. She slept not a wink during the night, and it wasn’t little Mariset that kept her awake.
Across her path walks William. Their eyes touch briefly and in his look he asks a question, subtle and unspoken, and Jeneth catches his intent and shakes her head somberly. No, her signal tells him, there is no news of Phoebe. William figured as much, and he shuffles off with the other boys toward the metalworks. Plots and schemes swirl in his mind.
An invisible wall of furnace heat washes over him as he enters. Hot cauldrons of molten ore bubble over fires that rarely stand unlit. By the dingy orange glow he pulls on his leather work gloves and joins the master workers by the cooling barrel. Already his head pounds in rhythm with the striking hammer and he looks dully around the dim shop. Wiry Creston carries an armful of unsharpened blades through the center aisle and outside to the depository where vast piles have accumulated—piles of tools, buckles, harnesses, arrowheads, and more swords and knives than could be counted with the simple maths they’ve been taught.
William reaches his leathered hand into the warm brine and fetches out more cooling blades and hands them off to another waiting apprentice.
“Thanks,” says Jorrie. Jorrie bears the prestige of being Temple born, though he is only half-kin to the Nezra. His mother is of the forest and his veins carry that defect alongside more noble blood. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“It’s okay, Jorrie.”
“Something bad is happening, isn’t it?”
William shakes his head and turns back to the water barrel.
“Come on, you know something… you always know something,” Jorrie presses. “What’s going on?”
“If I find out,” says William over his shoulder, “I’ll be sure to tell you.”
The striker sinks more glowing blades into the brine and William watches them darken and steam the water. He knows well enough what is happening, though he dare not breathe a word to anyone—it doesn’t take a spirited imagination to understand that these are the preparations for war.
There is commotion at the door and harried voices call every able-bodied man to the front. They take up arms and push through the smoky metalworks and emerge onto the misty grounds, then follow the general flow of rushing men and hustle off. More followers burst from cottage doors and the Temple’s grand entrance, coursing past the reflecting pool to the edge of the plateau. They stand shoulder to shoulder, their weapons drawn.
Taket heads the frontline of this tremendous swarm, his right arm raised high in the air, ready to give the call that will send the horde behind him storming down the escarpment toward whatever approaches.
The deathly moaning draws closer. Hooves crunch unevenly on the twisted path below.
“Hold,” shouts Taket.
The flaring nostrils of Balazir materialize from the murky swirl, and his powerful forelegs c
arry him toward the last rise and he becomes fully manifest, brown-speckled with broad, bellowing ribs. A sagging rider holds dearly to the crooked saddle. He grips the reins tightly with one hand, and the other dangles at his side like a ragdoll’s. Balazir hitches himself up onto the plateau and ambles forward a few paces and snorts toward the many faces that behold him, then shuffles back and settles himself.
Cirune falls to the ground.
His eyes loll back in his head. An entourage encircles him and lays him out flat and begins taking an inventory of his wounds. Through his rattled senses he feels the hands lain upon him, smoothing the sweat off his forehead and peeling back the hardened bandages on his leg and side. With the last of his feeble energy he thrusts his arm into the air, and in his tightly clenched fist is a crumpled scrap of thin hide.
Chapter Fourteen
They walk for days. The sun and moon chase each other around in circles, light and dark in a seemingly endless rotation, and as the firmament spins around them it begins to seem as if they are passing through the eye of a slow motion cosmic hurricane. In the light, they make ground. They pick fruits and berries, and fish the streams and ponds. In the dark, they sit wearily by their campfire and tremble at horrible shrieks of nocturnal slaughter, as delicate woodland creatures meet their end in the jaws of skilled night predators.
They traverse the changing landscape. They pass through regions where the shoreline is serrated from vast wedges of land that have fallen into the ocean, where small archipelagos dot the coast, all with man-made rubble on them. Little islands of ruin. They pass hill country with natural orchards scattered throughout like an enormous marketplace, and traverse graceful stretches of carnage and decay that still bear the mark of a civilization more advanced than their own. On and on they walk, through the serenely dangerous daylight and the howling, raucous nights.