Keeping With Destiny

by Stephan Knox

  Aari struggled to her feet only to trip and back down she went.

  “Drenn!” the gray-haired man called out and ran to her. He rolled her up in his arms and touched her face. “She’s as cold at ice. Quick grab one of the thermal foils.”

  Tulo, who had been the one holding the rifle, bounded up and threw an extra log in the rusty metal barrel. “Bring her in closer to the fire, Roman,” he called to the man cradling the small thing, while Dibley, a scruffy looking man disappeared into the old rail car that was now their shelter.

  Tulo then grabbed one of the blankets from one of their personal huddles and pressed it against the barrel for a moment then handed it over to Roman to wrap the girl with just as Dibley was coming out of the rail car with a silver blanket and they added it to the layers around the unconscious woman who had just stumbled into their camp.

  “Who is she, you think?” Dibley asked, looking over Roman’s shoulder.

  Roman adjusted so he sat cross-legged on the pile of wool rags, where he held the small body in his lap. He shrugged to his friends. “Not sure, Dibley. She sure is a tiny thing, though. Perhaps just a kid trying to escape the city.”

  “She wanted to know about the code talker. She don’t look like no spy,” Dibley chattered on.

  Dibley walked over to the radio and turned it up a bit, quietly listening. “He uses so many mix words, how can anyone know what he means or who he is talking to?” he spoke to neither of his comrades for any particular point. “Tulo, you trade all over, beyond any of us Rogue-Free. You ever see her before?”

  “She knew the name Titan,” Tulo reminded them. Tulo squatted down next to Roman and pressed the back of his fingers to the girl’s face. Cold like death. He pinched her nose closed which was instantly contested by Roman.

  “What the drenn are you doing?” He batted Tulo’s hand away.

  Tulo only slapped him back and again pinched her nose closed. The response soon came, and her mouth popped open to take a breath. Unconscious and cold as death, yet still alive. A dark bruised ringed her neck. “Looks like she might have been a slave,” he observed allowed. He took one of her hands to see if she had similar bruises on her wrists but stilled when he saw the burns on her hands. “One of you get a jar of the salve from a pack.”

  Neither moved.

  “Go. Now.” And Dibley trundled off for the rail car again.

  Tulo leaned over her and pulled one eye open to stare into a dull brown eye, then he opened the other. Roman saw it first and the gasp told Tulo even before he saw the one blue eye. He released her eyelid as if she was the fire then stretched up to his feet, looking around them. Turning one way then the next, looking for some trap to be sprung or whoever was chasing her to suddenly appear. “Quickly. Get her loaded up on the mule. We’ll take her to the midwife in Chuutay. They’ll know what to do with her.”

  Aari woke to warmth and to hot fluids being forced down passed her lips. She jarred herself awake and scampered back across the floor until her back hit a wall. She shot a hurried glance around her, calculating her surroundings and anything she could use to fight or block with. What she found was little more than a dark kitchen and hearth room. One woman kneeling nearby and a large burly man holding a funnel and a tin can squatted next to her, both seemingly surprised at her. Behind them, another man sat, watching both her and the door.

  Aari moved her mouth around trying to formulate a word, after some considerable effort she managed three, “Who are you?”

  “We’re friends. You were brought to us for help, frozen and near death.”

  Aari glanced around, spotting a hot poker. She could go for it if they tried anything with her. She’d at least leave a branding on their flesh they wouldn’t soon forget. “H-how long?”

  “Tulo and Roman said they found you during the late day and brought you here right away. The sun has just dropped beyond the mountains, a day of two before now.” The woman took the tin cup from the man next to her and motioned him with her head to back away.

  “You talk strange. Talk like the radio,” without truly thinking Aari commented.

  “Our friend, Tulo, says you know him by his real name,” the woman responded with a bereft smile, then gestured at the man again.

  Aari watched as the man frowned but obliged, giving them some space, and took a seat at a worn, wooden table in the center of the room finding that another sat there as well hidden in the shadows. He was harder to study. It didn’t help matters that the kitchen was lit with only one oil-burning lantern that she could see sitting on the same table, and the hearth fire, giving the room over to too many shadows.

  “Where am I?”

  “Chuuttay. But you can’t stay here, child. War broke out just two days’ past. Maegray is no match for Jazirian, with its head cut off and so many after a generation dance on blood with the Skaddary snakes of pendulums swing— swing— swing.”

  Aari starred at her, trying to decipher what she meant.

  The woman’s head bobbed, and she made a tutting sound which hummed from her lips. “You know his name but not our talk.”

  Aari shook her head, which the woman agreed with.

  “Maegray has two heads, neither any good. They know they haven’t the strength to win this. So, they will stop at nothing to find anything to give them some advantage,” she explained. This time without the code talking.

  “A war?” Aari glanced around the room, at the woman who fed her the details, then to the two men sitting just behind her. Keeping a watchful eye both on her and on the door. The nervous twitch made Aari very uneasy.

  “Yes. A blood bath between greedy men. Some say a Titan started it, then turned them on each other. The horizon is set afire with the onslaught.” The man sitting is the dark spoke out.

  Suddenly the woman’s voice dropped to a whisper and leaned in closer to prevent anyone else to hear. “I don’t know what gifts you carry, but they mustn’t find you.”

  Aari snapped her head around, looking at the woman with every alarm going off inside her. She didn’t have the strength to keep running. Not without help. She wished Tannin was with her. He’d take care of her. She knew he would.

  The woman only tried to force on a smile, but the sadness in her eyes conflicted with it. “Here—” she pushed another cup into Aari’s hands, “—get some more soup in you. There is another village— only a few stands in its whole, just westerly of here. There used to be an old seer who they said conversed with the very Keepers of Destiny. But she’s been gone for some time, swept out by the blood of snakes and boxes and whales. Go there, you. The seer’s family still waits for you there. It’s their destiny to return you to the Keeper’s water. You need to go to them. They are the only ones who can protect you. Get you away from here, away from Jazirian and from the Lord Marshal.”

  Tears streamed down Aari’s cheeks. She’d just escaped the Lord Marshal, the seer had not and They had done nothing to help either of them, but perhaps the seer’s family could show her the way to someone else.

  To Tannin.

  NO SEER TO LEAD ME

  Tannin sought out the seer his mother had often spoke of, only to learn she had been the one taken by force to serve the general and the lieutenant colonel.

  Only now, there was a duel for total control between the two men of position. A spitefulness that had the Lt. Colonel soon appointing himself as Lord Marshal.

  ~~ Take one out— another will take its place. ~~

  The only way to truly end this was to cause civil unrest.

  News had already reached his ears that the Maegray soldiers had in fact marched out and collided with Jazirian’s army. Tannin had spotted the MV4s flying overhead towards the battlefield that on day three still raged on in full heat, lighting up the distant horizon in a line of red that now glowed at night.

  In the sudden conflict, the city’s leaders were at their most vulnerable. Weakest when caught unsuspecting. But Aari came first. He had to find Aari
first.

  “Rest you to know the seer has been set free,” he told them as he sat at the wooden table of the small peasant home. He devoured the stew they offered, saving a few bites that he stuffed into a piece of bread along with the cheese he had set aside then wrapped them up to save for Aari. To which he would gladly sit on her and force her to eat every bite of it if he had to. He asked only to find her again.

  “You should go to the temple,” one of the seer’s family, a young woman, spoke up.

  “All the temples are destroyed,” Tannin spoke solemnly, keeping back the growls that rumbled inside him. The woman was not his enemy, nor did he wish to impugn her words of advice as nonsense, but he could not let go of their encounters at the last temple or all that had happened since.

  “One has been kept sheltered by Them.”

  “A temple survives?” Tannin asked, trying to hold back the bitterness he felt for Them at the moment.

  “It is underground, not too far from here. If you are to find your friend, it would be there.”

  Tannin listened carefully to the details of how to find the temple while he stuffed the carefully guarded morsel of food inside his coat and shrugged on his packs of gear, he was already at the door when she stepped close to whisper a password.

  Tannin smirked. “I won’t be needing a password. They already know I am coming.” And with that, he headed out the door and vanished into the night.

  NO OTHER DESTINY WILL DO

  Aari was hoisted upon the horse and instructed to sit forward just as the man, who’d been introduced to her as Brienam, jumped up, throwing a leg over as he did and came down on the horse’s back behind her. He called out with a sharp whistle and another rider came out from the woods and gave a tip of his hat. With a kick of his heels, they were off at a run. “Hold tight, little package,” Brienam clucked in her ear, but even if she failed to do that, one of his thick arms wrapped around her and held her tight against his body, keeping her safely atop of the horse as they took off under the cloak of darkness to the small village the midwife told her to go to, to find help and to hide.

  Tannin made his way in the dark with ease, both the full moon that sat high in the night sky and his animalistic night vision aiding him. He kept a fast pace in an open run along the valley floor, keeping an eye out for the trail markers that would lead him to this hidden temple. He passed along the ruins of several large buildings, ripped and jagged walls of decayed steel and broken concrete rose up from the ground, supported mostly from the piles of rubble that crumbled down as it collapsed either at the time Terra flipped or over the hundred or so cycles since it’d happened. Now lifeless and the structure’s nature long since forgotten. These didn’t even serve in the new world except as reminders that all great things can come to an end and eventually be wiped clean from the minds of men. Just like the tyrant men who tried to rule— their time too was soon to come to an end.

  Tannin nearly missed the entrance as he watched the walls of the ruins for snipers, but there they were, a broad passage of stairs leading down into the ground.

  He stood at the top step, looking down into its darkness, letting his eyes adjust a moment, watching for any movement. Then glanced back up at the scraps of old-world watching him.

  He slung Aari’s rifle around to his side on the ready and then pulled out his pulse pistol raised and aimed as he proceeded down the stairs.

  Each step echoed off in a crunch of glass and sand under his feet against the tunnel walls. Rats and vermin alike stirred, announcing his coming with small squeaking sounds as they skittered away. A pair of glowing eyes poked out from a darker recess. The hairs on Tannin’s neck bristled up and he sniffed out an identity from the dank stagnant air.

  A low warning growl came from the direction of the eyes and Tannin realized it had to be a wolf or wild dawg. He let out a growl of his own, mimicking the animal’s sound, and it dropped back giving Tannin passage.

  His sym stirred, waking up every sensory they had, and Tannin counted out his paces as they moved deeper into the underground abyss.

  The fluttering sound of a few bats moved overhead, flying in and out of the tunnel to feed. Soft footsteps were coming just ahead of him. Not rushed and not seemingly to sneak up on him either, just light-footed, paced, and unrushed.

  Tannin stilled letting his ears do the tracking. He inhaled the stale air for warnings. He found none but brought the rifle up and aimed in the direction of the sound despite the lack of threat coming towards him. Then a small glow appeared. Tannin blinked a few times, trying to register it as it came down from the ceiling and then he saw the long hem of a robe coming down a wide set of steps up ahead, only slightly off to the left side of the square carved tunnel where Tannin stood. Another passageway that would have been easily missed.

  “Man of Destiny,” the soft-spoken tender whispered to him when he reached the bottom of the steps. He paused there, holding the lantern in his hand out letting Tannin see him better. His robe merely a drab dusty color was remarkable only by the design on its breast. A symbol which most took to be the body of a Symbiotai. He then waved Tannin to follow. “This way,” the charitable face never speaking higher than a whisper, bowed his head with respect then turned, and quietly went back up the steps.

  Tannin kept his guard and his gun up but followed up the long flight of stairs until they opened up into a massive domed room lit up with oil burning sconces hanging from a balcony that circled overhead. The floor was littered with the dust of fallen plaster which had apparently once coated the domed ceiling.

  Large columns circling the room held what little was left of balcony passageways framing, its floors having long since fallen or rotted away, leaving only its ring of hand rails, stacked up three tiers high.

  The robed tender cut across the room and stepped through a door to the right. “Come. They are waiting for you,” his voice echoed back to him.

  Tannin took another long glance over the deteriorated room and then followed after him.

  They came up another set of stairs. These much narrower and had undergone recent maintenance of new hardwood boards laid out and nailed into place.

  “It isn’t much farther,” the tender spoke softly as if his soul purpose in life was to encourage the meek to endure just a little longer and all would be wonderful on the other side of accomplishment. Always holding the lantern up high over his head to illuminate the way.

  At the top of the steps, the tender stepped aside and stopped letting Tannin move passed him. Again, they found themselves inside yet another great room. Only this one seemed to be carved right into the valley cliff wall. And were not of the old-world structure, but something newer and had been kept hidden and out of site all along. Plastered walls loomed up high then seemed to merge in with the granite stone that lined the back of the chamber. Several priests, all clad in the dusky blue robes of their faith stood in silence along the walls— waiting, just as the tender had said they were.

  And there, in the center of the room just beyond a scrying pedestal, stood Them.

  The Keepers of Destiny.

  Six in all, stood before him like some counsel of judgment. Tannin wondered for a moment if that was all there was. All of mankind’s fate in the hands of just six. Five men and one woman. But the moment passed, he cared little about Them or how many of them there were. Aari was the only thing important to him right now.

  Anger now replaced wonder. They had been here all along and had done nothing to save Aari. “Where is she?”

  “To whom do you seek?” the one female Keeper asked softly.

  Tannin snatched the first man within reach, his fist curling up in the man’s tunic and lifted him from his feet. “Don’t mess with me.” Tannin growled, “You know who I seek. Aari. Where is she?”

  A hand suddenly appeared over his and gently nurtured Tannin to let go. “We do not see the child,” the most familiar of the Keepers now standing next to him answered.

 
Tannin dropped the tender he held and turned to the more familiar face. “Yes, you do. You have always watched over her. Now tell me where I can find her.” Tannin was barely hanging on by a thread; he not only felt the need to kill, but it lit up in the color of red behind his eyes.

  “We told you before, she no longer holds a destiny. Therefore, we cannot see her and for that reason we cannot tell you were she is.”

  Tannin scanned their faces, reading the small details he’d grown used to with people. He inhaled searching for the stench of lies, but only an earthy smell like dark rich soil, dried leaves, and fresh tall grasses touched his nose. Nothing to note their deceit, but the other face, the one who had spoken first. His features shifted slightly, and Tannin caught just enough of it to know what he had seen and where he had seen him last. And it wasn’t at the village. “You—” he spoke sternly bringing his sword up to point in his direction, “—you were the old man with the chickens. You saw her, saw Aari leave the lake of the dead.”

  Tannin didn’t even warn them as he took a step twisting his hips then spun about bringing the sword around using its weight to carry it over, but the Keepers were mere wisps of dust floating in the air as his blade sliced through them. “Drenn you! I will bring this temple to the ground if you don’t give me what I need!” The faltering strike pitched him off balance and he stumbled to regain his stance, now seething in his rage and his eyes glowered from one side of the room to the other, looking for something to destroy.

  “What you need?” A woman, centuries old, stepped from the stone wall as if it had been made from air. She raised her arm up, and to her right, stepped a young maiden. “Here is what you need,” the Keeper woman said. “A breeder that is ready to give herself to you.”