K T Harding - [Hinterland 02]

by K. T. Harding

  What would become of the poor kid? Would he have to leave the house, just when he started his training, to get away from the heartache of never measuring up to his long-time idol?

  Far from Dax coming between Raleigh and Bishop, Raleigh now faced the sad reality that she came between Dax and Bishop. Dax worshiped the ground Bishop walked on, and now Dax fell in love with the woman Bishop loved. This situation couldn’t be worse.

  Dax steered the carriage up to the door, and Raleigh and Bishop climbed aboard. Bishop called out the window, “Take us to the Gingerbread House.”

  Raleigh’s head whipped around, but the carriage already started at a fast clip down the long driveway. “The Gingerbread House! What are we going there for?”

  Bishop leveled his piercing eyes at her and pressed his finger to his lips. The message couldn’t be more clear. He didn’t want Dax to know what they were doing.

  The Gingerbread House. Those words sent a shiver down Raleigh’s spine. Why? The Gingerbread House was nothing more than a smelly saloon on the outskirts of town. She got directions to Bishop’s house from one of the patrons when she first came to town.

  The carriage rumbled through the streets, and Dax pulled up in front of the saloon. Bishop and Raleigh climbed down onto the sidewalk. Dax cast one last pitiful glance down at them. Then he turned his eyes toward the horse’s back straight in front of him.

  Bishop pulled his notebook out of his breast pocket and flipped the pages. He called up to Dax without looking, “Go home, Dax.”

  Dax didn’t turn. He muttered under his breath, “Yes, Sir.”

  Bishop turned on his heel. “Come on. Let’s go.”

  Dax started the carriage at the same moment. The wheels clattered along the cobblestones and dwindled around the corner. Dax and his problems disappeared out of Raleigh’s life. Bishop and Hinterland and all they represented rushed in to fill the vacuum. She gave her whole attention to nothing but them.

  Bishop pushed his way through the swinging doors into the saloon. He paused there still holding the doors aside. He surveyed the room so Raleigh couldn’t see around him into the darkened interior.

  Voices bubbled beyond him, but when he entered the saloon, all talking ceased. Bishop took another step inside, and a distinct male voice called out, “Well, if it isn’t the Wolf!”

  The doors swung outward, and inward, and outward. They left a space big enough for Raleigh to enter behind Bishop, and her eyes took a moment to adjust to the murky light.

  The Gingerbread house couldn’t be a more ordinary saloon. The bar stretched all along one wall. A greasy barman and a made-up barmaid stood behind it, stock still. All the other people in the saloon stood still, too. They stared at Bishop with wide eyes.

  Black paint covered the opposite wall, along with innumerable chalk marks scrawled all over it. Counting slashes marked every illegible scrawl. Raleigh couldn’t make out any of the writing except one section cut off from the rest by thick painted white lines. Clear, white letters printed across the top with the words, The Wolf’s Wall.

  Raleigh didn’t have time to read the scribbled rows of lettering. They ran in columns from the ceiling to the floor, and the same white slashes numbered off each one.

  Bishop strode into the room. Dead silence accompanied him between the tables. Only his pounding bootheels disturbed the stillness until Raleigh came up behind him.

  Bishop got halfway across the room when a tall man drew himself out of a chair to block his path. He was the man who gave her directions when she first came to town. He told her he and the rest of the town knew Knox Bishop’s reputation, and he advised Raleigh to go back where she came from by the first available mail coach. Then she spotted him making bets with his friends on how long she would last as Bishop’s apprentice.

  The man skidded his chair aside. He did his best to face Bishop with a nonchalant sneer on his face. “If it isn’t our old friend, the Wolf. Hello there, Wolf. On your way to meet up with your wolf pack again?”

  Bishop came to a stop right in front of the man. The man stood a full head taller, but Bishop didn’t flinch. The man’s two companions sat at the same table, but they looked away. They pretended they didn’t see their friend baiting Bishop in front of everybody.

  The man squared his shoulders and locked his eyes on Bishop’s face. He forced a laugh, but Bishop said nothing. He just stood there, as still as a statue. Raleigh didn’t have to see his face to know the look on his face. His face didn’t look like a statue’s at a time like this. His eyes drilled into the man’s face until the man looked away.

  The man kicked his chair again. Its wooden legs screeched across the floorboards. He shrugged and jerked his chin at one of his friends. “Are you gonna deal or what?”

  Bishop’s voice cut like a knife. “You forgot something, Layton.”

  Layton’s head shot up with a very different expression on his face. “Huh?”

  “You forgot something, Layton,” Bishop repeated.

  Layton’s shoulders slumped, and he lowered his eyes. No one could look at Bishop when he glared like that. “Oh…uh…. sorry, Wolf. Sorry.”

  Layton grabbed the back of his chair and dragged it away. He stood well out of Bishop’s path while Bishop stalked the rest of the way across the room. Raleigh trailed in his wake. Layton glanced up at her and gave her a weak smile before he moved his chair back into position. He sat down in it and started playing cards like nothing ever happened.

  Bishop came to the far back wall of the saloon. He turned around and gave the room one last imperious glance. No one moved. Layton and his friends never looked up from their card game. The three of them pretended Bishop and Raleigh weren’t there. The barman and barmaid and all the rest of the patrons stared at Bishop and Raleigh until their eyes bugged out of their heads.

  Raleigh couldn’t fail to understand this scene if she’d walked in blindfolded. They called Bishop, the Wolf. They had a wall labeled The Wolf’s Wall, with dozens of tick marks numbering something off. She saw Layton and his friends betting on her. That wall could mean only one thing. They bet on Bishop’s apprentices, the same way they bet on her. His reputation for transforming himself into some kind of wolf hybrid must have spread and earned him that nickname.

  Bishop turned his back on the saloon and all its misconceptions. None of those people knew the first thing about Knox Bishop. They heard rumors and whispered innuendos. That was all.

  He turned the knob on a door in the back wall, and Raleigh slipped through it behind him. She closed the door, and the latch clicked.

  She looked up to see Bishop regarding her. “Is anything wrong?”

  He hesitated a moment. “Are you ready?”

  “Of course I’m ready. You know I’m always ready.”

  He still didn’t move. “Nothing you want to ask me before we go?”

  Raleigh glanced around. “Is there anything I should ask you?”

  He waited. He expected her to ask about the saloon, but she didn’t. She already understood everything. He didn’t have to explain.

  When she didn’t answer, he nodded and turned away. “All right. Come on.”

  He dropped down a rickety wooden staircase into what she suspected must be the saloon basement. This must be another hidden entrance to Hinterland, just like the one behind the library fireplace at Bishop’s house.

  The stairs didn’t open into a tunnel like the others, though. Instead, blazing light illuminated the stairs from below. The farther they dropped, the brighter it became until Raleigh had to squint to protect her eyes. Bishop didn’t stop. In fact, he trotted down the stairs faster two at a time until he reached the bottom.

  The farther she climbed down, Raleigh paused more than once to look around her. She couldn’t believe the evidence of her own senses. The stairs ended in a sunlit field spreading as far as the eye could see in every direction. Waving grasses and nodding wildflowers rippled in the breeze. The whole field glowed bri
ght golden with the sun streaming out of a crystal clear blue sky.

  Dainty clouds decorated the sky and rolled on the wind. The sun warmed the earth and wafted the scent of summer into Raleigh’s nose. She knew that scent. It harkened back to days at home, those long-ago days when she didn’t have a care in the world beyond ridding her farm and garden of the odd pesky monster.

  Bishop waited for her at the bottom of the stairs. He rifled through his notebook and furrowed his brow. He showed no sign of surprise over the surroundings until Raleigh choked out, “What in the world is this place?”

  He didn’t look up. “This is Hinterland. I told you. Hinterland holds more curiosities than you can possibly imagine.”

  Raleigh glanced up the stairs behind her. The stairs they just climbed down to get here rose up from the drifting waves of grass. They stuck straight up from the ground into the pristine sky. The crude wooden door through which they passed to leave the Gingerbread House sat at the top of the stairs, suspended in midair.

  Raleigh could barely get the words out. “But…but…we’re outside! I thought we were going underground, the way we did before.”

  He bound up his notebook and put it in his vest. He looked up to meet her startled gaze. “We are outside. We’re not underground anymore. Hinterland isn’t like the world up there. It’s a law unto itself. All the rules you thought you knew back in our world don’t apply here. You have to forget everything you knew and accept Hinterland the way you find it. That’s the only way you can make sense of it. You’ll go crazy if you do anything else. Believe me.”

  Raleigh opened her mouth, but she couldn’t make any sound come out. This was Hinterland, just like those vast caverns, the dark tunnels, the secret caves she saw before. This was Hinterland. This was Bishop’s world. He suspended all his expectations and accepted it for what it was. He walked through the fire of expecting it to behave the way that other, normal world behaved. He came out the other end, and he understood it.

  Now it was her turn. This beautiful open country, this sun piercing her eyes—this was as much Hinterland as Endavors and kataracts and laenteglos. She couldn’t hold the two realities side by side in her mind. She hadn’t developed Bishop’s hardened comprehension of the place yet.

  He didn’t wait for her to develop it, either. He snatched her hand and pulled her forward. “Come on. We’ll miss our flight.”

  She had no choice but to stumble after him. “Flight? What flight?”

  He didn’t answer. He towed her into the grassy meadow. She waded waist deep in rustling stems. The warm wind blew in their faces. It kicked Bishop’s coat tails out behind him and brushed Raleigh’s hair off her forehead. It cooled the sun’s heat.

  Bishop didn’t let go of her hand. They found a rough wagon track through the grass. They walked side by side in the ruts. The scene calmed Raleigh beyond anything she ever expected. This peaceful tranquility was Hinterland. Hinterland wasn’t all fear and death and mayhem.

  She and Bishop could be two lovers walking hand in hand through a meadow. They could be on their way home from a church picnic—if only she ignored the weapons bristling all over both of them.

  The track wound a long way over the meadow. Once Raleigh glanced back. The stairs with the door sticking up at the top stood tiny on the horizon, but it was still there. It hadn’t vanished.

  She might fantasize that she could come back to those stairs and that door, that she could find her way back up through the Gingerbread House and back to her own room in Bishop’s mansion.

  Even as she entertained that thought, she knew in her heart that would never happen. She would never see those stairs or that door again, and she certainly wouldn’t go up them to return home.

  A cold sinking certainty chilled her heart. Hinterland had her. It claimed her for its own. Bishop tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t listen. She had to follow her curiosity. She had to see it for herself, and now she’d seen too much. She would follow him and this track wherever it led, and it would lead her so far away from the human world she might never find her way back.

  She no longer understood enough to know if that human world was above her, or below her…. or anywhere. Maybe it no longer existed. Maybe Bishop led her across some mystical barrier and she would never be human again.

  The second time she looked back, she no longer saw the stairs, but that was the distance hiding them. They were still there. She was the one who traveled so far away they might never have existed in the first place.

  She had nowhere to go but onward, and as long as she held Bishop’s hand, she could go there. She could go anywhere, as long as she was with him. He understood what she needed to keep her anchored while she made the final leap into the unknown.

  Was that the reason he asked her to leave Dax behind? Maybe he couldn’t hold her hand the way he knew she needed with Dax tagging along. That would be just like Bishop.

  Chapter 5

  The sun sank toward the far horizon before a black shade popped out of the open prairie country. The closer they got, the more Raleigh recognized its outline until they entered a thriving village.

  Children played in the streets. Dogs barked and scampered away from wagon wheels. Men lounged in store doorways, and horses flicked away flies with their tails at the hitching posts. Women carried laundry baskets between the buildings and hung the articles from lines strung between the windows.

  Raleigh understood this place. This was just another village like so many others. She understood these people to the bottom of her soul. People were still people everywhere, even in Hinterland.

  Bishop kept hold of her hand. Men hailed him by name. He smiled back and nodded, but he didn’t stop walking. A boy about eight years old barreled through the street and collided with Bishop. Bishop shoved him out of the way with a laugh and went on his way. Even the dogs smiled and wagged at him.

  Bishop strode through town on his long legs until he passed through the other side of it to open grassland again. He didn’t stop until he rounded a corner by the livery stable. The blacksmith clanged his hammer against his anvil. The noise filled the whole village with a comforting sound, the sound of home.

  Bishop looked around. He pulled out his watch and checked the time. “We’re right on time. We won’t have long to wait.”

  Raleigh looked around, too. “We won’t have long to wait for what?”

  His arm shot out, and his eyes pierced the blue firmament. “There! There it is.”

  Raleigh followed the direction of his pointing finger and beheld something moving in the clouds overhead. Their puffy whiteness parted, and something white and oblong drifted toward the ground.

  Raleigh watched in amazement as the object drew closer. A huge rotund white body ballooned over the top of the thing. It reminded Raleigh of the wood grubs she used to pick out of sawn firewood logs, only a thousand times bigger.

  The object, whatever it was, sank to the ground and landed with the lightest bounce in the grass outside the village. Some mysterious motorized contraption stuck out of its hind end, along with two whirling propellers.

  Half a dozen men stepped out of a small compartment under the thing. They raced around the field and stretched ropes to secure the object to the ground. They sledgehammered pins into the sod.

  Raleigh gasped out loud. “What is that thing?”

  “It’s a zeppelin,” Bishop told her. “We’re going to fly in it to Pernrith. That’s the fastest way to travel anywhere in this country.”

  When the men finished tying the vehicle down, they opened the same compartment under the balloon. A dozen people got out and ran toward the village. The men clutched their hats to their heads against the wind rushing off the zeppelin’s propeller, and women held their skirts in place.

  As soon as they made their way to the livery stable where Bishop and Raleigh waited, the men motioned Bishop and Raleigh forward. Raleigh wouldn’t go near that thing for all the tea in China, but Bishop snatch
ed her hand. “Come on!”

  He wouldn’t let her go, and the undeniable compulsion holding her to him worked its charm again. She had to follow where he led. He wouldn’t take her on this thing if it wasn’t safe. This was how Hinterland people traveled, so she could travel that way, too.

  Bishop rushed across the field, straight into the wind’s teeth. He pinned his hat to his head and narrowed his eyes. Raleigh’s hair whipped her face and stung her eyes until she couldn’t see where she was going, but Bishop guided her to the compartment door. A man opened it, and she stepped inside.

  Peace and silence surrounded her. Only three other people occupied the compartment, and the great mass of white balloon spread up and away on all sides above their heads. The instant Raleigh stepped inside, the man secured the door. The crew outside hauled up the picket pins and leapt aboard once more.

  With all ready, the great propellers behind hummed to a loud buzz. The compartment vibrated, but the noise and wind and danger remained outside. It couldn’t touch Raleigh here.

  Benches and seats lined the compartment. A stout lady in a fancy dress settled herself in a seat and patted the chair next to her. “Sit down, Pat. We have a long flight ahead of us. You’ll wear yourself out standing there.”

  A young boy pressed his nose against the glass. “I want to see everything, Gran.”

  Raleigh knew exactly how he felt, even if she was too old now to press her nose against the glass. She couldn’t see enough of the enormous whirling propellers turning into a blurring circle behind. She squeezed Bishop’s hand so tight she must have hurt him when the balloon lifted off the ground and floated into the sky. She glanced up at him for reassurance, and he smiled down at her. He knew. He must have experienced the same wonder and excitement and disbelief the first time he rode on this machine.

  The zeppelin pointed its white nose into the clouds. It sailed high above the village until the wagons dwindled to little toys. The people scurried through the streets like ants until they disappeared in a great expanse of green.