Shatter (The Children of Man)

by Elizabeth C. Mock

  Kade looked down at the blood welling around the ripped fabric. “And I just got this shirt,” he said in an oddly high voice.

  His legs shook and he sank to his knees. Faela pushed herself off the ground and half-caught him as he pitched forward and they both fell. His head resting against her shoulder, she grasped the blade behind him and wrenched it clear of his body. She threw it away from them. It hit the rock face with a metallic clang. Her hands were sticky with blood.

  Kade’s weight sank further into her shoulder. Cradling his head, she began lowering him to the uneven ground until he lay horizontal and she stood straddled over him. The jagged stones scraped against her knees. He began to tremble with increasing force. Faela searched his face. It had faded to the color of exposed bone.

  “Don’t you even think of dying.” Faela tried to keep her tone light. “You’re going to be just fine, Kade. I’ve seen men sleep off worse than this. I see Marvin took care of you. Good man, yeah?”

  At the sound of her voice, Kade’s eyes fluttered and he looked at her face for the first time. Silver eyes, the color of moonlight, stared back at him. She fumbled for the vial under her shirt and her eyes disappeared beneath a red haze as her lips began moving in a regular rhythm. Golden light flared at her temples, pulsing in time with the soundless movement of her lips.

  Kade blinked and coughed. He looked at Faela like a confused little boy. His fingers brushed her wet temples. “You’re a Gray,” he said with a painful wheeze before his eyes rolled back in his head and he sucked in a breath that would not come. His fingers dug into the dirt as he tried to breathe.

  The rain came down in sheets now, soaking everything in a matter of moments. Though it was slick with blood and water, the leather thong, laced tightly through her fingers, held the vial close to her palm. Pulling out the dagger from her boot, she sliced his shirt open, not bothering to even rip off the buttons. Ignoring his heaving, she placed her hands above the wound and a bright scarlet light pooled around them.

  Faela closed her eyes and saw the darkness flaring in his chest as it seeped through his lung. The sword had punctured his right lung and it had begun collapsing as it filled with blood.

  Faela moved to draw out the darkness around the wound, but a pliable barrier impeded her progress. “No,” Faela whispered in panic, “not now.”

  Water running into her eyes and down her jaw, she shook her head. “Darkness take him, not this time.”

  Pulling a hand away from Kade, she brought it to the ragged wound at her side and pressed against it causing her blood to cover her palm. She flinched in pain and brought her hand back and began to audibly hum a clear and low note. Placing her palm over the wound, she allowed her blood to mix with the blood welling from Kade’s chest. As the two energies mixed, the barrier hardened, then shattered.

  “Kade,” she said attempting to keep her balance as Kade tried again unsuccessfully to bring air into his starving lung, “I know this is going to be hard, but try to be still. I know how frightening it is, but you have to be still.”

  He stopped moving. She wasn’t sure if he had heeded her advice or if he had lost consciousness. Right now she didn’t care which as she followed the flows deep into the wound. A ravenous and flaming darkness spread through his lung like fire. It headed for his heart. Faela began siphoning the darkness away from the lung. It surged against the healthy red that she had begun to weave back into the wound.

  He gulped again, unable to suppress the reflex any longer, taking gasping breaths that tore his throat, but brought no air into his suffocating lung. She continued knitting the energies into a springy lattice that would close the wound. The melody she sang matched and shaped the weaving of the energies that mended the rupture.

  Sweat mixed with rain fell into the cut on Faela’s face. It burned. Despite the sweat, she could feel the warmth leaving her the longer she worked. Her skin grew cold and wet like a dead fish. Her humming rose into a low musical chant.

  “Faela?” a groggy voice asked from the ground. Jair levered himself up onto his elbows, his hair, dripping wet, was plastered to the side of his face. Seeing Faela covered in blood, Jair scampered to her side like a newborn foal. He slid in the mud. “What happened? You’re white as the dead, Faela, and you’re shaking. What’s he doing here? What happened to him? What happened to you? Are you singing? Faela?”

  Faela ignored Jair’s questions and focused solely on reinforcing her net. Kade’s tremors stopped. He drew in a strangled breath as his lung inflated and he closed his eyes gratefully. Her patches would have to hold for now. Faela released the energies and the crimson and golden light surrounding them dissipated.

  Kneeling, her legs straddling Kade’s torso, Faela stared ahead of her with a strange, yet satisfied smile, then collapsed to the side.

  Jair caught her. “Faela?” he asked, fear in his eyes.

  Faela patted his cheek with a blood-streaked hand. “Watch my body for a few days, Jair.”

  Her head lolled back unsupported and her body fell limp. Her breathing was shallow, but steady. She had fallen into the peaceful oblivion of sleep.

  “Over by the bar,” the elderly herder said, in a low voice to his companions, “that man be wearing all black.” He turned his head and spit on the floor superstitiously.

  “Ain’t no one dressed like that up to nothing good.” The man with a full beard glared openly at the man. “Aberley ain't need his kind around.”

  “I mean, look,” said the young man with a hooked nose who kept tapping his foot as he fidgeted, “he got that halberd there strapped to his back, plus those big old knives. Looks like a merc from the war.”

  The group made no secret of their glares or their topic of conversation. Knowing this, the man at the counter turned his hips slightly exposing the holster sitting low on his belt. This wasn’t his first experience with those living along the border. Let them talk.

  He heard the hook-nosed boy squeak as his voice cracked. “You see that? He got one of them revolvers. I ain’t want to know what he done for Evensong to get one from those cutthroats.”

  “Keep it down, Andy,” the herder said beginning to look nervous, “we ain’t need no more trouble.”

  The voices of both the young and old men at the tables drifted to the ears of the man in black. He grinned, but the scar running from his mouth up to his temple pulled his lips into a leer. His legs crossed at the ankles, he rested his elbow against the counter, waiting. His dark auburn hair stuck out in a short ponytail from under a black kerchief. He fingered the grip of the revolver in an unconscious gesture.

  Finally, an aged woman came out from the back to the bar. Though she appeared plump, she moved with a swiftness and more energy than a woman half her size and age. Looking at the man, she sniffed. “The boy told me you be needing something?”

  “I was told you seen a young man in his early twenties who was tall and lanky. Would’ve been a few days back,” the man said, leaning forward, “and I heard you talked with him. He would’ve seemed a real charmer.”

  The woman pulled a rag out of her apron and started wiping down the counter. “Oh, I remember that one. You mean the Daniyelan boy. Oh, he laid it on thick, that one did.”

  The man’s eyebrow rose in surprised amusement. “One of the Daniyelans?”

  The woman looked the man over again before she responded. “Of course, he used a Daniyelan temple token, signed for it and everything. What innkeeper would turn away a token? We all use the Orders’ services.”

  “Can I see the ledger?” His hand reached into the pouch at his side. When his hand left the countertop, a few coins remained behind.

  The woman smiled and swept the coins into her hand where they disappeared into the pocket of her apron. She reached under the counter. “Don’t see the harm.” She placed the ledger on the bar and opened it. Spinning the book, she pointed to a row near the bottom of the page. “That’d be him.”

  The man read the script and laughed. “He say where he w
as headed when he left?”

  “He came through pretty late, but he ain’t get a room, just some supplies then he was gone. If you ask me, I’m a mind to think he gone up into the hills. But Daniyelan or no, leaving when he did, he’s good as dead now.”

  “Why’d you say that?” the man asked with interest as the tavernkeeper’s tongue loosened as she began to warm up to him. He had no illusions regarding what warmed her up and it wasn’t his winning smile.

  “We’re a border town, ser. And I don’t care none that he’s a Daniyelan, ain’t no one survive long on the border alone.”

  “My thanks for the information, mistress. You been real helpful.”

  She waved at him with her rag. “Thanks be all well and good, but it ain’t pay my bills.”

  Placing another coin on the bar, he nodded. “Good day, mistress.”

  Leaving the tavern, he saw the wide, swift running river in front of him and looked to the left where a woman in tight, black leathers stood balanced up on the toes of one leg. She smiled at him and her entire face sparkled, then she flipped backward onto her hands and sprang back onto her feet. Her short black curly hair bounced with the movement.

  “Imp.” The man stood observing the woman’s figure with appreciation. “Always showing off.”

  The woman planted her hand on her hips and walked suggestively toward him as she pouted. “Oh, come now, Caleb. Can’t I have a little fun?”

  “See.” Caleb caught her around the waist and pulled her close to him. “I was thinking more of the kind of fun where I get to play too.”

  “Lecher,” the woman whispered, as she laced her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly, then pulled back smiling. Her fingers played with the silver chain that hung around his neck. At the end of the chain was a medallion with the emblem of a harp and a crescent. “Well, was the information reliable?”

  “Talise, you are a horrible tease.” He laughed with regret. “But yes, it was. He seems to have finally gotten desperate. He’s trying to pass himself off as a Daniyelan and seems to have succeeded here. Somehow, he got a hold of some temple tokens. Though darkness knows how he pulled that off.”

  “He didn’t sign for them using his proper name?” Talise asked with a musical laugh. “Did he?”

  “Oh, yes, he did. Looks like our luck is finally changing.”

  “You’re still irritated, aren’t you?” Talise said with entertained surprise.

  “It took four days to regain his trail,” Caleb said defensively as the preface to his rant. “Everything was going so good, beautiful scenery, even more beautiful company. Tracking him was like following a child who had just run through a puddle of paint. This was supposed to be a quick and easy retrieval and his trail just up and vanished at that creek. I had to pay for information to find him again and you better believe we’re getting that money back. So yeah, I’m a little put out.”

  Talise let her amusement at his annoyance shine through her dancing blue eyes. “Which way are we heading?”

  “Eventually, into the foothills toward the border.”

  “He’s going back into Nabos?” Talise drew her eyebrows together in concern. Despite Aberley being a river town, she didn’t question the direction Caleb had chosen. She had never met anyone to equal him as a tracker. “That seems counter-productive.”

  “You’re surprised? When has this boy done anything that made good sense, since we started tracking him?”

  “Why ‘eventually’?” she asked suspicious of his earlier choice of words.

  He slid his arm around her waist and steered her toward their horses. “If I’m any judge, there’s a right proper storm building in those hills and they’re not paying us enough for me to try to pick up his trail in the rain. We’ll stay here tonight.”

  “You’re still grumpy,” she said in a teasing voice. “But it has been awhile since I got to sleep in a proper bed.”

  “Who said anything about sleep?” he asked as he tilted her chin to kiss her.

  *****

  Chapter Four

  Before leaving the llama in the stable, Sheridan scratched Ossi behind his tall, soft ears. In gratitude, Ossi licked her hand with his rough tongue. She smiled at the gentle-eyed creature and left the enclosure. As she walked down the cobblestone street, the sun shone high in the sky over Wickcester, a seaside town caught between the rolling green wall of the Higini Mountains and the endless blue-green expanse of the Kurinean Sea.

  Despite the chill in the air coming off the inland sea, in the direct sunlight she felt stuffy and hot in the wool of her uniform’s amber-colored jacket. She pulled at its stiff, high collar, but kept it fastened shut. She still had one more task that required her attention before she was off duty. As she skipped up the steps of the local Daniyelan temple, her brown riding boots, that reached up to her knees, glinted in the light from habitual polishing.

  Sweeping her deep brown hair back with her fingers, it fell in a silky cascade down to the small of her back. Sheridan stopped and scanned the red and tan brick buildings across from the marble temple, but catching no sign of her partner she entered the building. The gas lamps lining the walls sent a pleasant glow to the high ceiling of the temple’s entrance, but her goal was far less grand than the sweeping arcs of the ceiling and the columns of the entry. As she took long strides toward a small wooden doorway at the end of the room, her boots clicked on the mosaic of a enflamed sword inlaid with glass and ceramic chips of every shade of orange imaginable.

  Pushing open the door, Sheridan found a young man with a low black ponytail wearing a similar uniform to her own standing behind a counter with rows of books and stacks of parchment lining every flat surface available. The man was by no means small, but he still stood slightly shorter than the tall, willowy woman in front of him. She opened a leather pack, slung across her body, with the same emblem of the flaming sword and removed a stack of papers held together with twine and sealed with orange wax. She set them on the counter.

  “Where’s my sweetheart, Noah?” she asked peering around the room as though she expected the elderly man to unearth himself from under one of the stacks.

  “That leg of his was acting up again, which of course got him on about his glory days,” the young clerk said taking her papers as he imitated the old man’s grating voice, “which of course got him telling the tale of that riot down in Gallow’s Way in Kilrood back forty years ago, when my mum were still playing with her rag dolls, back when there were Daniyelans in every town and city of the world with none of this circuit riding nonsense.”

  Sheridan grinned at the imitation. “That’s spot on. Really, well done.”

  The boy shook his head in amusement. “I’ll tell you what, for someone who claims to never have trained with the Lusicans, he can sure spin a tale like one. I’m Tanner, by the way.”

  “Sheridan,” she answered in turn. “Those reports are judgments from the Dalibor jungle circuit to be forwarded on to the archives in Finalaran.”

  “Sheridan?” he said with an excited glint in his brown eyes. “You’re not Sheridan Reid by any chance, are you?”

  “Last time I looked in the mirror,” she answered leaning her elbows on the high counter. The movement caused her slippery hair to slide over her shoulders.

  “Oh, that’s brilliant,” he said throwing his hands wide in excitement. “Oh, that makes things so much simpler.”

  “What does?” she asked with a tolerant amusement at his reaction.

  “We’re very low on the Amserian post priority. We only get our packages and letters popped in once a week, but Oscar needs a letter delivered to Finalaran to the main temple as soon as possible and our post was delivered yesterday. Do you think you could help us?”

  “I think I could manage that,” Sheridan said with a nod. “My partner should be here any moment if she’s done spoiling that mare of hers. You’d think it was a child the way she fawns over it. Can you tell her where I’ve gone?”

  “Surely, how will I rec
ognize her?” he asked.

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Sheridan said with a small smirk. “Imagine someone around my height, my build, same angular bone structure, similar almond eyes, except she’ll have cropped hair. Actually, just imagine me looking really annoyed. Where are your deliveries?”

  Tanner stared with an unsettled expression, clearly confused by her description, but handed her a bundle of letters and packages. Without further explanation, she gave him a conspiratorial wink before she wandered out the door adjacent to the counter and down a hall that led further into the temple. It didn’t take her long to make her way to the winding staircase that led to the tower. Her long legs took the stairs two at a time and brought her to the empty room at the top that only held several woven baskets of various sizes ringing the walls.

  Standing in place, she spun in a circle taking in the visual aspects of the room, the joints of the walls, the flaking of the mortar, the slick shine of worn stone. Once she was sure that she had a good lock on the room, her eyes glowed with a purple light and with a cracking pop the light flared around her and she disappeared. When the light dissipated from her vision, she stood in a different room fashioned out of orange-veined marble. A teenage girl in the lilac robes and trousers of an Amserian sat on a cushion on the floor.

  “Sheridan!” she said when she saw the tall woman. Scrambling to her feet the redheaded girl threw her arms around Sheridan.

  Knocking the breath from her lungs, Sheridan laughed and returned the hug. “Well met, Gwen. How’s the big city life treating you here in Finalaran? You enjoying being amongst us rowdy Daniyelans?”

  “Oh, they’re not all loud and obnoxious. But, I miss snow,” she said with a dramatic sigh before she lowered her voice, “but I cheat. I’ve been popping back to my rooms in Wistholt. I know we’re not supposed to during our post rotations, but I get homesick.”

  “Naughty girl,” Sheridan admonished, “wherever did you pick up such bad habits like that? I’ll not have your good character warped by such ne’re-do-wells.”