I sighed. “They’re just trying to frighten you. The villagers shot out all the large animals around here ages ago. Sometimes you can hear wolves at night, but they’re up in the hills.”
“That’s good to know.” He looked down at the book again. “So. Is it interesting?”
“Fairly.” I shrugged, for some reason wanting to play it cool. “Captain Merric takes his men up the Tsel, fighting crocodiles and natives and never really sure where he’s going. Only he gets the blue fever and dies, and his men have to go back without ever finding the source. Only ten out of thirty made it back to Ashe-Katarion.”
“You know how it ends?”
“I’ve read it before. We haven’t got that many books, so I read them over a lot.” I flushed a bit, embarrassed. None of the villagers have any books at all, of course, but I thought that a novice from Elysium must find my pretensions at literacy pathetic.
“I used to read a lot,” Peter said with a sigh. “The Great Library at Elysium has thousands of books. Thousands. Some of them are as old as Karis the Savior. None of the novices are allowed in there, though. Here, Father Orrelly only has the Wisdoms, and he barely takes it down from the shelf anymore. He knows it by heart.”
“I read the Wisdoms, too.”
“I bet Captain Merric and Khandar are more interesting, though.”
I wasn’t sure if I should answer that truthfully—he was a priest, after all, or would be—but the look of longing on his face was such that I couldn’t help but nod. Then, moved by an uncharacteristically generous impulse and the odd, fluttering feeling that was just beginning to take root behind by breastbone, I said, “You could borrow this. If you promised to bring it back.”
For a moment Peter lit up, but then his face fell. “I can’t. If Father Orrelly found it, he’d scold me, and he might take it away.”
“Then come back here tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll bring this for you to read, and something else for me.”
“Really?”
I nodded, feeling like a prince dispensing spectacular munificence. Peter’s smile made me feel warm, and slightly buoyant, as though I might float away into the midsummer sky.
***
That was how we met, and how we started spending every sunny day reading in the clearing. At first we always sat in silence, reading, but eventually we began to talk a little as well. Peter told me about his life at Elysium, where he’d grown up from a very young age. Classes with the other novices, theology and languages and sums. Endless chores, rebuilding decaying sections of the crumbling, ancient fortress-city. Meeting boys from everywhere in the world that knew the Savior’s grace, Vordanai and Old Coasters and Deslandai.
In return, I showed him my life in Nestevyo, the paths through the woods with which I’d grown so familiar. I knew where the old mother fox lived with her kits, and a place where there was a hollow tree so big we could both fit inside it together, pressed tight and giggling. In the end, I even agreed to take him to the tidal pools, which I hadn’t returned to since that horrible day six years before.
Perhaps I should not have done that. Those pools have been nothing but evil luck for me.
***
Sagamet had lived another four years, then died from what my father said was probably a trouble with his heart. I had sat by my dog’s side, listening to his labored breathing, and in the back of my mind I’d wondered if I could help him, if I could still call up that cold feeling of the demon under my skin. But I’d promised my father, never again. We buried Sagamet in the stony soil in back of the house, and I’d cried myself to sleep. Going back to the tidal pools made me think of him again, and my eyes were unexpectedly misty as I led the way through the woods to the rocky shore where the natural basins could be found. Peter followed close behind me.
At his request, we bypassed a few of the shallower pools, where I’d once gone to look for fish and strange artifacts. Instead, I took him to a deeper basin, twenty feet across and full to a substantial depth even at low tide. Getting down to it involved a scramble over a series of ledges of protruding shale, edged with unexpectedly sharp points of rock. My hands were scraped and twinging by the time we reached the water’s edge.
I looked at the water dubiously. It was clear enough that I could see the bottom, and there was nothing more dangerous than a couple of trapped fish. Certainly no salverre. But it was too deep to pick the fish out with our hands, and we hadn’t brought poles or spears. Peter knelt and trailed his hand in the water.
“Brr. Not exactly a bath, but it’s warmer than the stream.”
Then, to my astonishment, he shed his robe in a heap. Underneath he had only an undershirt and breeches, and he was soon out of these as well. Before I could say a word, he backed up a few paces for a running start, paused, and jumped out over the water with a yell. He hit with his knees pulled up to his chest, creating a gigantic splash that flicked spray across my face.
I stared. We didn’t swim in Nestevyo. The Sallonaik was deep, dark, and cold, and the villagers who took boats out onto it treated it with an almost superstitious dread. There were worse things than salverre in there, lurking in the depths. I had never been in water deeper than my shins, and watching Peter stroke easily across the tidal pool was as startling as if he’d casually started to fly.
He reached the other side, took hold of the rock, and looked back at me. “Well? Aren’t you coming in? It’s not that cold.’
“I don’t . . .” I shook my head. “I can’t . . . I mean, I don’t know how to . . .”
“You don’t know how to swim?” Peter pushed off from the wall and dove under the surface, skinny pale legs kicking for a moment in the air. I watched with mounting horror until he popped back up with a gasp right in front of me. “It’s shallow enough to stand here. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“I’ll just . . . watch,” I mumbled.
“Come on,” Peter said. “It’s only water.”
Whether it was his mocking smile or the heat of the summer day that convinced me, I couldn’t say. Eventually, though, after much prodding, I left my own clothes in a pile beside his and slid gingerly into the pool. It was cold, but not as cold as the lake; the sun on the rocks had warmed it a little. I had a moment of panic when my feet slipped on the slimy bottom, and Peter caught my hand to steady me.
“Try putting your head under,” he said. “Getting your hair wet feels good.” His dandelion-puff hair hung heavily around his head in thick blond masses.
It took a lot of coaxing, but eventually I managed that. Peter took my hands and convinced me to take my feet off the bottom, kicking so frantically that I beat the water to a froth. He laughed and laughed, and I ducked my face in the water to hide my flushing cheeks. After an hour or so, he had me doing a reasonable dog paddle. I even, breathless with my own daring, followed him out into the center of the pool to tread water over an abyss perhaps eight feet deep.
“Where did you learn to do this?” I said while we were resting.
“At Elysium.”
“I thought Elysium was up the side of a mountain, next to a river of ice that never melts. Wouldn’t you freeze?”
Peter nodded. “There are places where water wells up out the ground, too hot to touch. That’s why Saint Ligamenti built the first fortress there. He was fleeing into the mountains, his men were all freezing to death, and God showed him where there was a spring warmed by an eternal flame. Nowadays it’s all pipes and valves and things. The water goes into these big cisterns to cool, and you can swim in them.” He winked. “If you’re smart enough to get away from the barracks without the priests finding you.”
I laughed. “I thought it was all books and chores.”
“There’s plenty of that, too.” He pushed off the wall, grinning. “Come on. Let’s try to touch the bottom.”
***
When the sun started to slip toward the horizon and the col
d waters of the Sallonaik began trickling over the lip of rock separating the pool from the lake, we reluctantly decided it was time to go back to the village. Peter scrambled back onto the rock where we’d left our clothes, and held out a hand to pull me up. We stood for a moment, dripping and shivering but thoroughly happy. It occurred to me, the thought springing from nowhere, that I would like nothing more in the world than for Peter to kiss me.
I turned away from him immediately, fumbling with my clothes. By the time I managed to get dressed, Peter was already climbing the ledges, and I scrambled after him. Our wet hair and damp garments made it cold in the shadow of the trees, so we set a brisk pace on the walk home. We’d come some distance, though, so I had time to think.
It wasn’t that I’d never thought about that sort of thing before—I was a fifteen-year-old boy, after all—but it had always seemed to take place on another world, something I could view via the telescope of my books but never touch. None of the village girls had ever shown the slightest interest in me, and I had long ago written them off entirely. The Borelgai court romances were full of brave knights and their ladyloves, but their affairs seemed to consist almost entirely of pining, jealousy, and tragic or violent deaths. What I felt now—what I had felt for some time, I began to realize—was entirely different.
Before I had decided what I could possibly do about it, we were approaching my shack. This was usually where we separated, me to return to help my father with the evening’s tasks, him to report back to Father Orrelly. Today I saw that our little boat was halfway out of the water, as though my father had been out fishing and had gotten distracted before he’d gotten the chance to pull it entirely onto the rocky beach. It wasn’t until we left the trees behind that I saw the crumpled shape beside the boat, and my throat went tight. All thoughts of Peter were immediately gone from my mind.
“Father!” I said, running the last few yards. He lay on his side beside the boat, one hand stiffened into a claw and tangled in his shirt, his eyes wide and unfocused. His breath was harsh and ragged, and his skin had darkened to an ugly gray. He gave no sign that he noticed my approach, but only kicked his legs feebly.
“Father,” I said, already crying freely. I fell to my knees beside him, groping for his hand. “Father, what’s wrong?”
“It’s his heart,” Peter said. I looked up, my eyes blurry with tears. I had forgotten he was there.
“What should we do?” The Priests of the Red were taught a little bit of healing, I knew. They were often the only recourse of lonely villages, far from the cutters and surgeons of the city. “Help him!”
Peter chewed his lip. “We can take him inside, try and get him warm.”
I nodded, sniffling, and went to take up my father’s legs. Peter took his arms, and somehow we managed to lift him. The world seemed to spin around me. This was my father, the man who had been at the center of my life since I could remember, as unchanging and eternal as the sun and the moon. Now we were carrying him into our shack like a sack of wheat, his head lolling, a spreading stain on his breeches were he’d pissed himself. I nearly dropped his legs several times, and once we had him laid out on his thin pallet, I sat down and started sobbing.
Peter spoke to my father, tried to get him to respond, snapped a finger in front of his eyes. He bent down and put an ear against his chest, then sat up.
“What do we do now?” I said.
“I don’t know. I don’t think there is anything to do.” Peter shook his head. “Abraham, he’s going to die.”
“No!” I slammed my fists against the earth. “No. There has to be something you can do!”
Peter just shook his head. I closed my eyes and wiped the snot from my nose, breathing hard.
There was nothing he could do. Maybe nothing any doctor could do. But there was something I could do, something I’d sworn never to do again. Deciding to break my solemn promise took me only a moment.
“Get out of here,” I said to Peter.
“What?” He stared at me. “What do you mean?”
I couldn’t let him see what I was going to do. “I mean go. Leave. Please. Leave me with him.”
He shook his head again. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Peter—”
The breath rattled in my father’s chest. His hand twitched, weakly. There was no more time. I put Peter out of my mind, put everything out of my mind except my father and the cold feeling of the demon, sliding up out of the depths of my soul and down into my fingers like an old friend coming home.
5
It has to be a drug.
Every day, Alex sleeps soundly, no matter what I do to try and wake her. She only starts to revive as the sun sets, and once the guards spoon-feed her a bowl of soup, she’s unconscious again in moments. I’ve tried to watch them prepare the soup, but I can’t see very much from my chained position.
I start to think about how I can help her.
***
Very little breaks the monotony of the days as the wagons grind north as fast as the roads allow. A week of sunshine dries the mud to hard-baked clay, and we make good progress, but then the rains break and it’s back to probing the muck with sticks.
I now pray for rain. The farther we go, the closer we get to Elysium, and the smaller my chance for escape. Not that I hold out a great deal of hope anymore, but once we reach the fortress-city there will be no chance at all.
So Hunter tells us, anyway. Once or twice a week, Alex’s nightly drugging is put off for a few hours so the Penitent Damned can come and lecture us on the life we can expect once we’re interred in the ancient catacombs. A healthy one, apparently, well cared for but ascetic in terms of physical pleasures. Hunter tells us this will be good for our souls, give us time to contemplate the hereafter, though how this squares with his earlier comments about being predestined to eternal damnation I cannot say. Theology was Peter’s subject, not mine. I wonder if these lectures are official Church policy for incoming prisoners, or if the Penitent is simply indulging himself with a literally captive audience.
I look forward to those days, though, because in the time before Hunter arrives, I have a little while to talk to Alex. It tears my heart to watch her struggling toward awareness, the moment of pain in her eyes as she surfaces from whatever dream had captured her and realizes that reality is still the wagon and the chains.
She tells me a little bit about her life in the League cities, and the small details are what astonish me. Newspapers, for example. I try to imagine a place where paper and printing are so cheap they can be put to a single use and then discarded, and my mind boggles. I counted myself fortunate to have access to a couple of dozen books; in Hamvelt they must have every book in the world.
“Did you know about them?” I ask her. “These Penitent Damned?”
She shakes her head. “The Old Man was always warning me about the Sworn Church, but I don’t even think he really believed there were still Priests of the Black. As far as I knew, I was the only one with . . . a demon, I guess I have to call it now.” Her face went hard, and I decide to change the subject.
“The Old Man—your father?”
“No—I mean, yes, I suppose, in a way. The closest thing I ever had to one. He was my teacher.”
“In a school?” My breath caught trying to imagine it, thinking of the stories Peter told of his days at Elysium.
She chuckled. “No. He was a thief.”
“A . . . thief?”
“The best thief in the world.”
Needless to say, there were no professional thieves in Nestevyo. If something was stolen, it was never long before the culprit was discovered, and the villagers administered a sort of rough justice measured in shared favors, public shaming, and an occasional beating. I listen in awe as she tells me about Metzing, who robbed from the rich and powerful and was successful for so long he became a kind of hero. It fits perfectly
into the world of the cheap romances that had provided so much of my reading material.
“Will he come find you?” I blurt out, my mind suddenly abuzz. If someone like that were to help us, then surely—
But I can tell, at once, that it’s the wrong thing to say. Her expression goes cold and hard again.
“He’s dead,” she says. “They killed him, when they took me.”
We sit for a moment, in silence. I am aware of precious seconds ticking past, these rare guarded moments, but I cannot think what to say.
Time runs out before I can decide. Two guards ride forward from the rear of the caravan, with two strangers in tow. By the state of their clothes and horses, these men have been riding hard, and yet they are clearly impatient to be off. The guards make them speak to the Priest of the Red, an exchange of rapid-fire Murnskai.
“What’s going on?” Alex says, straining against her bonds to see. “What are they saying?”
“They’re couriers on their way north with news.”
“What news?”
I listen for a bit, then shrug. “The King of Vordan is dead.”
Alex blinks. I can see whatever they’ve given her fading, her powers of concentration returning. But not fast enough; Hunter comes, with his speeches, and then the laced gruel that sends her back to her poisoned sleep.
***
It is not only sympathy that makes me want to help Alex. I have a slender reed of hope, a castle built on a foundation of sand. My reasoning runs like this:
She has a demon. I have a demon, too, but I am not kept unconscious day and night. It is a great deal of trouble for them, and they would not do it without a reason. Therefore, Alex’s demon is one that, without the drug, might be able to help us escape.
If I can keep her awake long enough for her mind to clear, we have a chance.
She has a chance, anyway. She might flee on her own and leave me to rot, but I don’t think this likely. Though we have only had a few short conversations, I feel like I know her well enough to make this guess, at least.
The Shadow of Elysium (Shadow Campaigns) Page 3