Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2)

by Becca Mills

  I lay there in the sweltering heat, annoyed by a rivulet of sweat running down my right temple. My hair was already soaked. Gross.

  I pulled on my robes and crawled out of the tent into the brilliant light. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. I felt like Sam Spade getting grilled by the cops. My eyes burned and watered. I let them adjust to the brightness before walking over to the caravan’s stores, which had been set out under a larger pavilion-style tent, along with several buckets of water and some other supplies.

  Mizzy was there, fanning herself and drinking. She looked up as I approached and shot me a tired smile.

  “Hey. You okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just miserable. How many days of this?”

  “At least thirty. Probably more. There are always delays — illness, injury, broken equipment.”

  I took in that dreadful news.

  We were both silent for a minute.

  “There’s something wrong with this place,” I said. “I don’t like it.”

  “I agree.”

  “Maybe we should —”

  “If you don’t want to spend years getting to Fur, we have to go this way.”

  “Yeah, right.” I sighed. “I’m going to scrounge up some lunch. Want something?”

  “No thanks. It’s too hot.” She looked around. “I guess I’ll lie back down.”

  “Okay. Sleep tight.”

  She rolled her eyes and headed back to her tent.

  I dug through the stores, taking a strip of dried meat and a handful of fruit.

  I tore off a bite of meat and looked around.

  Our sleeping tents were a little ways off to the west. The camels were clustered in several groups nearby. They’d long since eaten their fodder. Most were now parked on the ground in their odd crouches, dozing or chewing their cuds.

  Out past the camels, I could see four sentries guarding the camp. The one to the north was Williams. I recognized him by his size.

  I turned, looking in all directions. Beyond the sentries, nothing. The ground had a very slight roll to it, but you could still see a long way. There were no animals, no movement whatsoever — just dry, cracked ground and the pale fuzz of dead vegetation.

  I leaned down and pulled up one of the plants. Before it crumbled away, I saw it was a fern. This stratum had been worked into being long before grasses evolved.

  A light breeze brushed my face, then died.

  Except for the occasional noise from the camels, silence reigned.

  I shuddered. The place creeped me out. It wasn’t the creepiness of the rainforest. That was about the alien mixed in with the familiar. This place just felt wrong.

  “Why are you up?”

  I just about jumped out of my skin. Williams. Beats me how he’d managed to approach so quickly.

  “Just getting something to eat.”

  He eyed me for a minute, then unwrapped his headdress and got a drink of water. The sentry posts were tented, but just being ambulatory out there must be pretty unpleasant.

  “Are there usually animals here?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Have they all just starved?”

  “Could’ve migrated.”

  I looked around again. The emptiness of the place felt oppressive. Our little encampment seemed out of place — an outcropping of clutter and noise in the quiet blankness. I wanted to migrate right out of there, myself.

  “Something feels really off, here. It’s bothering me. I think Mizzy feels it too.”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  I waited for some elaboration, but he turned away and started rooting through the stores.

  “The other route, the long one — does it go through Blue Seas?”

  He grunted an affirmation without looking up.

  “Maybe that’s what Callie meant — that we should take the water route.”

  He was silent for a long moment. Then he turned. “If we take Blue Seas, we won’t make it on time.”

  “But you did think about it? That Callie might’ve been talking about our route, not about Mizzy?”

  “Yeah.”

  I studied him. He’d weighed a dangerous route against putting Cordus in default and had chosen the former. Maybe he really did have to obey Cordus. Or really wanted to obey him? But no, he wasn’t like Yellin. Williams hated Cordus. I was pretty sure of that.

  But what was I thinking? Cordus could make Williams feel or want or do whatever was most convenient. I’d discovered that the hard way myself.

  The man turned back to the stores. I stood there for a minute watching him, wondering what his real story was — his identity, motives, abilities.

  Whatever the plot details are, I bet it’s a horror story.

  Food in hand, I headed back to the tent, picking my way through the resting travelers.

  I lay down and tore off another bite of the dried meat. It occurred to me that it might be dino jerky. I examined the strip, but it looked like any other piece of dried meat — brown and shrunken. I couldn’t tell what it was.

  Oh well. I’d had a lot worse.

  I lay there, chewing.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t shake the anxious feeling. I reminded myself that Williams was a force to be reckoned with. If there was a power wandering around out here, or some kind of monster like the Thirsting Ground, we were in trouble. But short of that, his barriers could probably protect us from any attack.

  Assuming he wants to protect us.

  I finished eating and then smoothed down the tiny hairs on my arms. It was ridiculous to have goosebumps in heat like this.

  I woke up in the late afternoon, feeling off.

  I gathered my stuff and got out of the tent. The caravan assistants would want to break it down as soon as possible.

  When I got to the camels, Mizzy was just finishing loading hers up. She came over to help me with mine.

  Her smile faded as she approached. “Beth, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She arched an eyebrow.

  “I just feel out of sorts, you know?”

  “Yeah.” She looked around. “I don’t like it here, either. But some strata are like that. They’re just not right for people.”

  “Have you been to this one before?”

  “Yes. Not for a long time, though.”

  “Was it creepy like this?”

  She got a far-away look, and some seconds passed. “I don’t think so,” she finally said. “But I had other things on my mind, at the time.”

  “Will you tell me about it some time?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “It’s a long story. And not a nice one.”

  We readied ourselves, then got something to eat and helped pack up the rest of the camp.

  The land was as empty and silent in the evening as it had been at the height of the afternoon. The camels’ grumbling calls sounded weirdly loud and intrusive.

  I shook my head and kept packing. Weird as the place might be, we had to pass through.

  The first part of the evening went much as the last — we plodded on for a good ten miles, tense with a combination of anxiety and boredom.

  In the middle of the night, the caravan master called a halt. He told us the road passed by a spring-fed oasis, there. If there was still water on the surface, it would be an easy place for the camels to drink.

  I could see his point. A camel could probably drink a lot. Supplying dozens of them a bucket at a time would take hours.

  The caravan master and his two assistants swept their flashlights off to the left of the road. Nothing. We moved forward slowly, pausing every hundred feet or so to check again.

  After about ten minutes, a stone marker showed up in the flashlights’ beams, and we turned off the road. Almost immediately, the land began to slope downwards. I peered ahead, trying to catch a glimpse of the oasis.

  The caravan master stopped. “By the powers!”

  Williams and I were riding right behind him, so I saw it at once: a figure lying a
t the edge of a small, scummy pool of water.

  It was a person, but it didn’t look right. The body was oddly contorted, and the skin looked gray.

  I flashed sickeningly back to when Callie had been burned, her skin turned to ash.

  The master slid down from his camel and hurried toward the figure. His assistants were right behind him, and several others followed after them, eager to help.

  Williams grabbed hold of my camel’s halter and shouted a warning to the people on the ground.

  Two of the ones who’d followed the master paused, clearly uncertain. After a few seconds, one jogged back to us. The other stayed where he was, looking back and forth.

  Williams jerked my camel’s lead rope out of my hands and tossed it to Terry. Then he pulled out a flashlight and his sidearm, training both on the supine figure.

  I drew my .38.

  The caravan master had paused about ten feet back from the pond’s muddy edge. His shadow stretched eerily before him, long and dark in the beam of Williams’s light.

  He called out in Baasha.

  The figure didn’t respond. It didn’t move.

  The master crept closer until he stood over the figure, staring down at it. His hands began to tremble.

  “Macabi!”

  He fell to his knees, groping over the figure and sobbing.

  One of his assistants knelt beside him, then looked up at us, pale with horror. “It is his brother. He has turned to stone.”

  My breath caught. The hair on my arms stood up.

  “Madre de Dios,” Mizzy said in a low, shocked voice.

  The other caravaners had clustered around us, their camel strings packed together in a bawling mass. They all looked scared.

  Ida and Terry were scanning the surroundings with their flashlights, but they were the only ones. The night closed in around us every time their beams moved away. Out by the oasis, the caravan master’s flashlight lay where he’d dropped it, sending a half-cone of light out across the ground.

  The only sound was the man’s wretched sobs.

  “Ryder,” Williams said. “Stay here.”

  He slid down from his camel and went to investigate. I watched as he played his flashlight over the figure on the ground, then slowly around the oasis, illuminating the full extent of the shrunken pond, the cracked earth, and a line of dead plants that must’ve once marked the far bank. The light dwelt on those skeletal bushes for a long time, but nothing moved.

  Finally Williams holstered his gun and knelt down. “Take him away.”

  One of the caravan assistants helped the master up and led him aside.

  I watched as Williams pulled out a knife and used it to lift the dead man’s remaining scraps of clothing. He tapped at the figure’s skin. The knife made a scratchy pinging sound.

  He looked up at us, clearly at a loss.

  Ida kooshed her camel and went to kneel by Williams.

  Curiosity began to overcome fear. The other caravaners trickled over to ogle the corpse. Eventually, Terry and I were the only ones with the camels. I looked at him, and he shrugged. Williams could hardly accuse us of being rash, at this point.

  We joined the others around the body.

  It was horribly contorted, as though the man had died in the midst of a seizure. Every joint was contracted, but differently, so that the arms and legs stuck out in random directions, holding much of his torso off the ground. The head was thrown back, the face twisted, as if in agony.

  He appeared to be crusted in some sandy material. Some of it had drifted down off him, creating a pale halo on the ground.

  “I can try to read his memory,” Ida said. “Find out what happened to him.”

  “Not a good idea to touch him,” Williams said.

  We all looked at the grief-stricken caravan master. He’d had his hands all over the body. He looked okay so far, but it had only been a few minutes.

  “I think I’d better,” Ida said. “I’ll make it quick.”

  She placed a finger on the figure’s exposed chest, then shook her head. “I can’t get anything. He’s been gone too long.”

  “Try with your healing gift,” Mizzy said.

  Ida shot her an annoyed look. “I think he’s past healing.”

  “I know, I know. I mean see if you can figure out what killed him.”

  “Please, Mizzy, I’m not a coroner!”

  “Jesus, fine. Let me try.”

  Mizzy pushed in front of Williams and knelt down by the body.

  Williams grabbed her arm and pulled her right back up. The look on his face was frightening.

  “What d’you plan to do? Scare him into talking? Or do you have a gift you haven’t mentioned?”

  Mizzy looked from him to me. All her bravado seemed to have evaporated.

  “I have a little healing. Okay? I don’t like to use it, so I don’t talk about it.”

  Ida stood up, looking baffled. “Why didn’t I know that? I don’t … if you can heal people, why don’t you want to?”

  Mizzy squirmed. “It’s complicated, okay? I’ll explain later.”

  Off to the side, the caravan master started wailing that something had to be done. The perpetrator had to be caught, or none of us would leave this place alive. The other travelers jostled around us. Even to a newbie like me, it was obvious they were close to panic.

  “Let her try,” I said. “She’s only risking herself.”

  Williams didn’t look at me, but I could tell he’d heard me — I could see the muscles in his jaw working, like he was chewing on his fury. I was surprised when, after a few more seconds, he let her go.

  Mizzy stepped away from him, rubbing her arm. Then she knelt back down by the body, placed her hand on the chest, and closed her eyes.

  Almost a minute passed. Everyone waited tensely.

  Finally, she sat back on her heels and looked up at us. I could see she was frightened. Frightened and tired. Using her healing seemed to take a lot out of her.

  Ida held out her waterskin, but Mizzy shook her head. “This hard crust on his body …” She rubbed her fingers together, and a fine powder fell from them. “It’s made up of desiccated microorganisms. Something like algae. Their cell walls are stony. The organisms covered him and formed a shell. As the shell thickened, he couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. He suffocated.”

  “How do you know?” Williams said.

  “Beneath the crust, he’s filled with the stuff. Live ones. He must have ingested them in the water, and then they …” She groped for words. “They made him into an aquarium. He’s an algae aquarium.”

  Williams translated, using a number of Baasha words I didn’t know.

  There was a moment of shocked silence. Then the caravan master grabbed a rock and rushed toward the body, clearly intending to break the crust.

  Williams grabbed him, and Mizzy began speaking soothingly. There was no point in smashing through the crust. That wouldn’t bring his brother back to life. The organisms were probably just trying to save themselves from the drought. They were very simple and could not have acted with intent to do harm. The crust on the outside was inert but the organisms inside were alive and could be dangerous — best to leave them contained. And so forth.

  The master’s struggles subsided as Mizzy’s working calmed him.

  She got him settled on the ground, then looked back at us, exhausted. Her expression was grim. “Now that I know to look for them, I can sense the organisms in my body. They’re not many, but they’re proliferating.”

  “I think she’s right,” Ida said. “I think I’m infected too.” She focused, her brow furrowing. “Yes. They’re there.”

  Ida laid her hand on Williams’s arm. “They’re in you too.” She touched the caravan master. “And you.” Kevin and Terry were also infected.

  “That’s enough,” Williams said, as Ida reached for me. “We’ve all got it. Can you heal us?”

  “I don’t know,” Ida said. “Let me try on myself, first.”

 
She closed her eyes, and we all waited. After a few minutes, she sighed. “I can’t get rid of them. No compound my immune system can make will get through those cell walls.”

  Williams turned on Mizzy.

  “No way,” she said. “My healing gift isn’t strong enough to deal with this.”

  Williams stared at her as though he didn’t believe it. Mizzy looked away.

  I was suspicious too. I could see hiding a gift like mine, but healing? Why would anyone hide that? It just didn’t make sense.

  The rest of Bill Gates’s people seemed equally perplexed. Terry glanced my way and looked down, clearing his throat. Kevin and Ida smoothed their faces.

  Perplexed, but still loyal. We weren’t going to get an explanation from those quarters.

  “How did this happen?” one of the assistants said in Baasha. “We did not drink from the oasis.”

  “The wells must be tainted,” the other said. “Macabi may have died here by chance. He may have been infected earlier.”

  Mizzy looked at the scummy water. “Maybe he came here to try to wash the coating off.”

  “Was he with a caravan?” Williams said.

  “Yes,” the master said, his voice dull. “His caravan left before ours — four days earlier. We were to meet in Vignobles.”

  The man had been aquariumed in six days.

  We all looked at each other, horrified. Then, as one, we looked down at our bare hands. I rubbed mine together. Did they feel a little chalky? I thought they might.

  “We must find the rest of Macabi’s caravan,” one of the assistants said. “We may be able to save the others.”

  “No,” Williams said. “We’re going back to the ligature.”

  For once, I agreed with him completely. If we’d been infected by the well in the ligature town, we’d already used up two and a half days. There was no time to spare. We had to get to a healer who could get those things out of our bodies. Maybe Hagut Kidron could do it. She healed the way Kara did. She wouldn’t be limited to what our immune systems could handle.

  The assistant became increasingly agitated, shouting that he had friends in Macabi’s caravan, and we had to help them.

  “They must have drunk the water, as Macabi did,” I said. “They are probably in the same condition. I am sorry.”