But no, it couldn’t be.
“Vandeborn?” he said.
Another grunt of laughter. “Ah, maybe I’m not so far gone, after all.” A pause. “McKay, of all the people I could have run into, you’re the last I expected.”
Lucian gave a grunt of his own. “Same goes for you.”
He dropped back, forgetting Charlie. To hell with the kid—if he wanted to beat him, so be it. He fell into step with Max Vandeborn, and the two of them enjoyed a companionable silence for longer than Lucian would have thought possible. For endless minutes, it seemed, there was no need to talk, for all that needed to be said was spread out before them. Their situation couldn’t have been better illustrated by the endless procession of prisoners—all that remained of the free communities of the South.
In time, though, his lips began moving of their own accord. “How long has it been?” he said. “Twenty years?”
Max grunted. “Maybe. I thought longer.”
“How’s life?”
“You know how it is. People come and go, times are good and bad. Recent times, more bad than good, I guess.”
It took Lucian some time to stem a belly-wrenching fit of wheezing laughter. “Tell me about it.”
They walked on, people were whipped, and the bloodied remains of a man whose body had given out was flung atop a pile of other emaciated corpses on the flat-bed of a wagon. Their laughter petered out and when they spoke again, their voices had grown sober and plain.
“What happened?” Lucian said.
“They hit us hard at sunrise. Burned us out, killed half, took half. That was then. They must have whipped a few dozen more to death by now. I haven’t seen anyone from back home for over a day.”
Despite himself, Lucian was disheartened. Max Vandeborn and Bill Bateman had always put the willies into even the most reckless con artists. They had lynched anyone who disrespected the rules of their house.
It was a blow to know even Twingo had crumpled like a house of cards.
He nodded. “Same story everywhere.” He hesitated. “Bill?”
Max shook his head. “Took a knife to the chest.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
“What are you doing here?” Max said. “Last time I saw you, you were quite the hot shit. I never thought you’d have let them take you alive.”
“I could say the same to you.”
Max cursed. “I should have died back there. God knows I’ve wished for it since. I even tried goading these pussies into sticking me. All my friends back home fell around me, and the others they took have been thrown on the wagons or left in the dirt, but I’m still here. I just can’t bring myself to throw myself on the sword, just in case further down the line there’s a chance to take a few of them with me. Anyways, it feels like it’s almost out of my hands, like something’s keeping me alive, wants me to see something before I’m put out of my misery.”
Lucian’s throat dried. “Funny, I thought the same thing.”
“You saw Him too, then?”
“Saw who?”
“Your brother.”
Lucian’s chest tightened.
So it was true. James really was at the helm of it all. Despite all the signs, he hadn’t been ready to believe it. After so long, it had been all too easy to think him dead. That the blackest mark in their history had never happened.
“So it really is him leading all this?”
“I’ve seen him with these very peepers, friend.”
Lucian nodded, numb.
He changed the subject before his mind could linger. “Where are we heading?”
Max nodded to the sun. “We’ve been tracking north since we left the tunnels they had us holed up in. Straight as an arrow.”
“How do you know?”
Max smiled. “Remember I said ‘welcome to the club’? I was talking about the hoods. I never had the pleasure of wearing one.”
“Why?” Lucian said, looking once more along the long line of people, most hooded, some not.
“Took me a while to figure it out.”
“Well?”
“The hooded ones they want confused, beaten. They’re the ones they take away for torture whenever we hole up somewhere. They always come back … different. Or they don’t come back at all.”
“And the rest of us?”
“Us, we’re the ones they line up to watch when they raze some other village or group of traders. They make us watch on our knees. See, I figure that’s why we’re here. We’re not for turning. We’re here to see everything we built turn to ash.”
Lucian cursed. “We received a radio message. The council was gathering in Canary Wharf.”
“Radio? A real transmission?”
“Apparently.”
“Think it means somebody else is out there?”
“A lot of people are praying for it, like some magic pill that’ll make everything dandy. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”
They kept walking. Charlie rode up a while and prowled alongside them, his eyes darting to Max—not, Lucian noted with satisfaction, without a note of apprehension about him—before heading up ahead once more. So that was why he had been hooded in the first place: Charlie didn’t want James to know whom he’d brought along for the ride.
When Max started talking again, it was almost to himself. “Some men are born mean, and some are made that way. Chadwick was a fool, too kind for this world, but he was just. He could have made something out of the ash of the Old World, maybe even better than Cain could have. And now he’s set on turning what’s left into dust. What the hell happened to him?”
Lucian didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “You’re wrong. We’re here for more than just to see the dregs of our lot fall. I think James has something more in store for us.”
Max was quiet for a time. “Well, I suppose we’ll see. We’re going somewhere, after all. Many things lie in the North.”
“Many,” Lucian said, but his thoughts lingered on one place in particular.
FOURTH INTERLUDE
“I’m going to kill him.” James threw himself over Beth, casting aside the peach vines and cupping her face. In the moonlight her skin glowed like marble, pale and bloodless. Her brow furrowed in intense concentration, and he could see an internal struggle raged behind her eyes. She shook her head, tearing her matted dress off and throwing it onto the dirt.
“No,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”
“That was so stupid, aggravating him like that!”
“I had to. He expects it.”
“You can’t let him do that to you. It’s inhuman.”
“You can’t change the way things are in the Moon, James. He holds all the keys. There’s too much at stake to throw it all away for me.”
James gripped her desperately. “Come with me. Run away!”
“I can’t.” She swallowed hard. “He’ll kill my family. That how he gets any of us to do anything. If anybody hadn’t shown at the banquet tonight …” She mimed holding flaming torch to kindling.
“That son of a bitch deserves to die.” He gripped her by the sides of her head and looked down into the dark holes where her eyes would have been. “I won’t let him get away with this.”
To his surprise, she tittered, a weepy yet stubborn sound devoid of all humour. “With what?”
“Treating you like you were some slab of meat. I can’t believe everyone just … just watched. Even me.”
She sighed and sank to the dirt. Crouched there in her sweat-stained undergarments, hangdog and pale, she was more alluring than when her hips had been in full gyration before the head table. Here was the real Beth Tarbuck, breathing in the scent of ripe peaches and petrichor, wriggling her toes into the soft wet earth. The shallow imposter who had danced before him, even with all the rouge exposed flesh rippling under golden torchlight, had been but a twisted shadow. The ache didn’t come from his loins this time, but his chest, so sharp it could have doubled him over.
“That was nothing,” she muttered. “He behaved himself tonight, for your sake, I’m sure.”
“What do you mean?” He crouched down beside her and, for a moment, glanced up the hill at Alice McKinley’s crooked form silhouetted against the great gibbous moon. She had known Beth would be down here, even though Malverston had neglected to invite her to the festivities. She hadn’t offered to accompany him, though he sensed it hadn’t been for a lack of caring—quite the opposite. She gave the tiniest of nods and then vanished into the mass of Newquay’s Moon.
“He might have you believe that all that was in your honour, but there is no shortage of his little banquets. Every time he orders the whole town to turn over their finest food and cider, and he brings all his slimy friends from all over to sit at those tables and worship his great golden shlong.” She sneered. “Know what they say about men with big feet? Well it ain’t true. But men like him have to be compensating for something, don’t they?” The sneer lingered on her face for a moment, then slid away like water off slate. “Believe me, most people around here never saw the other side of those doors before tonight. I suppose at least that part was for your benefit. And where there’s a banquet, there’s dancing.” She growled and cast the torn remnants of her dress into the orchard.
James sat by her, seething but immobile. “Why do you all do it? He couldn’t burn you all out, he needs you. Without the town, he’s nothing.”
She fixed him with a fierce stare. “You have no idea,” she muttered, “no idea what he really is.” She ripped her hair into its natural bramble-bush mayhem. She reached out and took his hands. He hadn’t realised they had been trembling. “Leave it be. Anything you do will make it worse. That’s the way of men like him. Anyway, you and Alexander care too much about your treaty with the Moon to tear it up over a field-hand’s daughter.”
James wanted to deny it, but found he couldn’t. Instinct told him that the right thing to do would be to take his pistol and blast Malverston away in the attitude of Old World chivalry. But all his long years by Alexander’s side kept him lame and mum.
She was right. They needed Malverston.
He grunted, fumed, and then found calm again as he looked upon her marble cheeks. “It’s not right.”
She punched his shoulder. “What ever is? You’ve been with the Messiah too long if you think the world is any kind of fair.”
James smiled, resisting the urge to rub where she had hit him. She had quite the right hook. “Things will get better now that we’re involved. We have things he wants, but we and our partners don’t deal with tyrants. He’ll have to play ball and change, even if only on the surface. And once the region is civilised again—really civilised, with enforced justice—there’ll be no room for his type.”
She was quiet, staring off along the row of peach trees, towards the distant bulge of the faraway hills, and the endless silvered wheat stalks in between, dancing in the breeze.
James swallowed. His words hadn’t come out right. They had sounded pre-prepared, mechanical and didactic. He had sounded almost like Alexander.
That wouldn’t do. He needed her to know he cared. He needed to see her smile. “I promise it’ll be better. Once he’s gone, we’ll even have schools, art, books. The Old World will be at your fingertips.”
“I don’t care about the Old World,” she grated. “I don’t care about books, all those grimy cities, or your precious mission. Things like that can never matter to people like me. All I can worry about is getting my weekly protection quota to Malverston’s men, and trying to keep out of his bed as often as possible.”
James felt his lips working, but he had no words left to offer. He searched deep, clawing at the bare innards of his mind. In the end what he managed to dredge up sounded pitiful and empty. “I will come back, soon.”
She looked as though on the verge of saying something, but a rustling to their right sent them both scrambling to their feet. James fingered his pistol grip, and called out. “Who’s there?”
A moment more rustling, then a tiny figure emerged from the peach trees. “What are you doing with her?” a harsh girlish voice hissed. “You get back, dirty pig!”
Beth growled like a cornered dog. “Go home, Mel. What are you doing out here?”
“Keeping dirty raping mongrels like him from taking you in the bushes. You know what Mum says, ‘It’s all any of them want from us.’”
Little Melanie Tarbuck fixed James with a vicious glare. Despite the darkness, James could just make out the slingshot in her hands, and the tiny ball loaded into the string—it would cut right through his skull at this range. She couldn’t have been more than eleven, but the weapon she carried was no toy, and she knew it. He had seen her cut crows clean out of the sky with it.
“Mel, go home.” Beth’s voice was infected with the same exasperated fury that siblings had reserved for one another since time immemorial, but she took the precaution of putting herself between James and the slingshot, nonetheless. That wasn’t a good sign.
James cleared his throat as he noticed the string slacken some. She had really been fixed to brain him. He tried to keep his fingers away from the butt of his pistol, but instinct kept drawing them back.
“He’s a friend, Mel. He’s one of Cain’s lot.”
“I know who he is.” Her face was set, far too old for her years. “You’re the one who’s been sniffing around our house every time they show up. Well you stay away from my sister. She’s not interested in boys. She and I are just fine with Mum, just the three of us.”
“Shut up, Mel. Get out of here. Go home!”
She shrugged. “Come on, then.”
“Without me, you little nit.”
Melanie’s gaze remained even, cool. It was eerie, seeing a child handle herself with such detachment. She set him on edge far more than any of the great ugly gorillas Malverston used as his private militia. “You can’t trust him. Men are all the same. We can’t trust any of them besides Dad—and he’s gone.”
“He’s not like the mayor’s men. Cain’s lot are … different.”
“That’s how they get you. Mum says they try all sorts of things to get you to trust them, then they get you alone, then …” She seemed to see the tattered remains of Beth’s dress hanging about her under-things for the first time. She bared her teeth. “You get away. Go on, go, before I put this rock through your eye!”
“It wasn’t him, Mel, it was me.”
“Why would you rip Mum’s dress?” Mel snapped disbelievingly.
“Because—because the mayor made me dance again. I—I … I felt his stink on me.” In the moonlight her face had flushed a dark grey.
Mel paused, and for the first time her emotionless veil dropped. “Again?” she said. “After what Mum did … he promised he’d leave us alone.”
“I know. He lied.”
“How could you?”
“I did it to keep you safe.”
“I don’t need protecting. I’d split his head wide open if he came anywhere near our house.”
Beth stepped forward and snatched the slingshot from Mel’s hand. “You stupid little girl, you think this thing would stop him? You have no idea what kinds of things he’d do, what I’ve had to do to keep him away from our door …” Her voice cracked, and she pushed her sister hard enough to send her careening into the vines behind her.
She eyed Beth, wounded and downcast, then after a few moments took her slingshot back and stowed it in her belt. “What were you doing with him, then?”
“We were just talking.”
James risked leaning around Beth, holding his hands out to the side. “I was making sure she was all right. You have my word.”
She glared at him and said nothing.
He tried again. “I’m James. James Chadwick.”
“I said I knew who you were. You think we’re just a bunch of stupid farmers, but we all know who you are.” Her brow flickered. “You’re the one who sends the birds. Everyone’s heard of your bunch.
The one with the big mouth they call the Messiah. You … They call you the Pigeon Keeper.”
James blinked. “That’s right,” he said. He took a step forward, around Beth. “We’re here to help you, your sister, everyone in town.”
“We don’t need your help! We’re just fine on our own.”
James and Beth shared a look. “It’s okay,” he said. “I have to go, anyway.”
Beth stiffened. “Now?”
He glanced between the two sisters. Mel was plastered to her side now; there would be no separating them. His time with Beth was over. “We have a situation back home we need to take care of.” He hovered for a moment, wanting nothing more than to take her by the hand and ride with her away from this place. Instead, he nodded to the little girl, and turned to leave.
“What do you want with us?” Mel Tarbuck said.
He paused, and shook his head. “Just to help.”
“Well, you should stay away. If you hadn’t come tonight, we’d both be home.” She took Beth’s arm, and for a moment, James saw the little girl underneath. “My dad gave my mum that dress. It was one of the only things the mayor hadn’t taken away from us … Now that’s gone too.” She glowered. “Just stay away.”
James made to protest, but Beth flickered her eyelids shut and shook her head minutely, squeezing Mel’s hand.
A moment of awkward silence passed between them. Then the noise of the emptying hall was carried on the wind, and the sound of people tramping home reached their ears. It was time to re-join the crowd before his absence was noticed. He backed away. “If you need me,” he said, “use the birds. They know where to find me.”
Then he was moving through the peach trees, heading uphill. Some time later Beth’s voice trickled from the darkness. “Stay safe, Pigeon Keeper.”
Minutes later, he and Alexander were riding across open fields, unspeaking. What had to be done had been done, and despite the turmoil roiling in his gut at the thought of what Malverston might do to Beth, he put Newquay’s Moon out of his mind, and turned his attention to the others back home.
Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) Page 13