by Layton Green
And the levers were the stars.
“They’re constellations!” he shouted, springing to his feet and pointing at the map. “That’s the pattern—we’re looking for a constellation!”
It was obvious, once he knew what he was looking at, that the levers formed star patterns. He was no astronomy expert, but he recognized Orion and a few others. And the biggest star of all—the sun—was the spherical room in which they were standing.
Faces pale, the others stumbled to his side in the green mist. Will rushed through his theory. Mateo and Gunnar clapped him weakly on the back, and Mala put her palms on the stone floor beside the map and peered at the images.
“Yiknoom fancied himself a ruler of heaven and earth,” she said, after a coughing session bent her double. “Yet even if you’re right, do we know anything about Mayan constellations?”
“I know a little,” Gunnar said, almost shyly. Will’s light-headedness had progressed, and he found it rather absurd that, with everyone coughing and slowly dying from acid smoke poisoning, their brutish fighter turned Mayan scholar might be their only hope for survival.
“The Mayans spent a lot of time studying the stars,” Gunnar continued, “so all the books talked about it. I know a few of their favorite constellations, but I don’t know their positions in the sky.”
“Give us what you have,” Mala said. “Quickly, now.”
Gunnar rattled them off. “Turkey, scorpion, death god, vulture, sun lord, night lord, maize god, armadillo, crocodile.”
“The Crocodile of Calakmul!” Mateo cried. “The Lord of all Suns! But that’s two that match—which one do we choose?”
Will scanned the drawn faces of the group. Eyelids drooping, hands twitching, no one was able to speak without coughing.
They didn’t have time for a mistake.
Gunnar leaned over Mala as she lay on her side, choking. “Will a healing potion help?”
Selina shook her head. “It would buy her a few minutes, at most. The gas would simply re-enter her system.
Everyone seemed to be looking to Will to decide. He ran a hand through his hair, all too aware of the price of failure. “The Lord of all Suns is my choice,” he said finally. “From what you said, that’s the legacy he would prefer. Not the image of a crocodile.”
From the ground, Mala nodded in silent agreement.
Will asked the question he was afraid to ask. “Does anyone know the stars in the Mayan constellations?”
“That one, yes,” Gunnar said, and Will released the breath he was holding. “It mirrors one of our own.”
The warrior bent over the map and pointed out seven stars Will knew as the Big Dipper. Part of Ursa Major. Will didn’t waste any time: he assigned everyone a single star except for himself and Gunnar, who he assigned two. The group hovered over the map, memorizing the route to their designated lever. Will knew if his guess was off, or if someone pulled the wrong lever, they were doomed.
As the party lurched to their feet, Will couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. That the choice between the two constellations had been too easy.
It smelled of a red herring, and he remembered something Gunnar had said about Yiknoom. “Wait!” he shouted. “Gunnar—didn’t you say the sorcerer king revered the Babylonians?”
“Yes,” he said, giving Mala a worried glance behind her back. “And?”
“Do you have the common zodiac here?” Will asked.
Mala scoffed. “Of course. I’ve known it since I was a child.”
“Yiknoom revered the zodiac,” Gunnar added.
“That’s interesting,” Will said, “because the common zodiac comes from the Babylonians. Who he also revered.” As eyebrows rose around the group, he continued, “Can anyone pick out the constellations?”
“I can,” Selina said. “Which one?”
Will ticked the zodiac signs off in his head, then gave a grim, satisfied smile. There was only one choice, and it felt right. He could feel it in his bones. “Taurus.”
“The Bull of the Heavens!” Mateo said. “Another of Yiknoom’s favorite names.”
Selina hurried to point out eleven stars forming the horns and body of the bull.
“Choosing between two seems too random,” Will said. “Taurus is my choice.”
Everyone agreed. Will divided up the levers again, this time taking three for himself. He gave three more to Gunnar, and two each for Mateo and Selina.
“What about—” Mala said, coughing too hard to finish her sentence. She started to swoon, and Will caught her.
“You’re coming with me,” he said, sheathing his sword and scooping her in his arms.
Gunnar looked ready to protest, but Will didn’t give him the opportunity. He didn’t know how much the toxic gas had affected the big warrior, or how much mental fortitude he possessed. Nor did Will care. He knew how far he had to carry Mala to pull the levers, and, despite his lethargy and coughing fits, he knew he could do it. Knew he could press through the pain and poison and whatever else it took to have a chance of saving the mysterious dark-haired girl hanging limply in his arms.
When he looked down at the greenish pallor of Mala’s skin and heard the rattle of her breathing, he felt as terrified as he ever had, even when cocooned alive in the web of the spider people. He didn’t understand why she affected him so much, but then again, he had never understood anything about love.
Stay with me, Mala.
Everyone sprinted in opposite directions. With his sword swaying on his back, Will ran as fast as he could down the corridor, cradling her like a child. “Put me down,” she said, though her whisper sounded far away. “I can walk.”
He ignored her.
“Will the Builder.” She tried to wag a finger. “This is my expedition.”
He took a right turn, past two intersections and down a long passage on his left. The first lever came into view. He raced to it, pulled, and kept on running.
She reached up to stroke his cheek. “Will the Builder.”
“What?”
She giggled. “What’s your favorite color?”
Will ran faster.
As the black-walled corridors flew by, enmeshed in silver light, it did feel as if he was racing through the night sky, reaching for the grandeur of the stars.
Her arms were wrapped around his neck. After a prolonged coughing fit, she buried her face in his chest and released a deep sigh.
“Don’t fall asleep!” he shouted. He rounded a corner and saw a long passage leading to the second lever on his route. He shook Mala to keep her awake, and she laughed lightly. “You play rough. Do you know what I like about you . . .”
She trailed off, the light in her eyes dimming. No, he whispered to himself. You have to stay with me.
Two more right turns, then a straightaway. His legs felt full of lead, arms cramping from the strain. A curve to the left. Mala sank in his grasp, her head lolling to the side. After two more intersections, the final star-shaped handle came into view, gleaming at the end of the passage. Drool seeped out of Mala’s mouth. He had no idea how many levers the others had reached, whether his plan would work, or what would happen if it did.
Gasping for breath as she slipped in his arms, he stumbled the final few feet to the lever and shifted her prone form to his left hand, sweating under the strain. With his right, he reached out to grasp the star-shaped handle.
And pulled with all the strength he had left.
-25-
Caleb woke on his back beside a silver stream. Dawn light filtered through the trees. Marguerite lay beside him, stroking his hair. A few feet away, the Brewer had started a fire and was heating something in a small pot.
As Caleb blinked and sat up, Marguerite leaned on an elbow and smiled. She smelled good, like warm spice and a buttery leather jacket. “There you are, love,” she said.
“What happened?” Caleb asked. He felt groggy but fine.
The Brewer glanced over. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“Singing. Rolling.” He shuddered. “Almost being turned into a giant mushroom.”
“I held them off long enough to get away, and they didn’t give chase. Fairies never stray far from their rings.” The Brewer took the pot off the fire and lined up three tin cups. “Coffee?”
“Yeah. Thanks. And thanks for saving our lives.” Caleb turned to Marguerite. “How’d you find us?”
“I was afraid I’d lost ye, honestly. When ye never came back, I noticed all the mushrooms and figured the fairies took ye. I slept during the day and searched the forest at night, looking for a ring. They never pop up in the same place twice. I s’pose I got lucky.”
Caleb swallowed. Lucky.
“But I wouldn’t ’ave given up,” she said, staring him in the face. “Not ever.”
He drew her close and gave her a long kiss.
The Brewer took his coffee and sat by the stream, grinning into the morning sun. “Didn’t think I’d ever see another sunrise.”
“So, the singing,” Caleb said. “Are you a wizard?”
The Brewer laughed. “Hardly. Back home, music has power, too. Its own kind of magic. Just not as strong as over here. Whatever ability I had to affect people with my music . . . it’s amplified on Urfe. By a lot.”
“So you’re some kind of . . . bard?”
“You can call it that, sure. There are others like me.” He grinned again. “Though none who can belt out a Freddie Mercury tune.”
With his brothers gone, it felt incredibly comforting to talk to someone from back home. “Where’s the flask? If I ever needed a drink, it’s after that experience.”
Marguerite looked him in the eye. “Didn’t ye notice the horses are gone? Someone raided the camp the first night I went looking for ye, including the grog. We only have the pack I was carrying.”
“Oh.”
“The Brewer’s going with us to the Blackwood Forest,” she said. “He’ll help us forage and drink from the streams.”
“Safety in numbers,” he said, glancing at Marguerite and then back at Caleb. “If you don’t mind.”
“Nah, man, that’s great,” Caleb said, and meant it. “Where’re you headed after that?”
“Dunno. I’ve been wandering the Ninth since I landed here. Don’t care for the Congregation too much. The only thing worse than religion is being told I can’t have one.”
Caleb chuckled. “Word.”
Marguerite looked confused by the conversation, and Caleb knew they needed to have a long talk, very soon.
Luckily, she had a compass in her pack, and they headed north, towards the Blackwood Forest. As they trekked through the pine needle-strewn wood, the two men chatted about home, forging an instant bond. The Brewer wasn’t sure how long he had been on Urfe, though he estimated ten years. His last year back home was 2002. It made Caleb’s head hurt to think about the time differential, so he didn’t bother. Will had come to believe that it swung erratically and was impossible to pinpoint.
The Brewer gathered berries and roots as they walked. After they set camp and had dinner, he sang a few songs for them, which helped relieve Caleb’s itch for a drink. Long and deep and haunting, one song in particular moved Marguerite to tears, and made Caleb feel calm and reflective.
“Did you learn that here?” he asked, not recognizing the language.
“Icelandic ballad,” the Brewer said, his voice faraway. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He lay on his back with his hands clasped behind his head. Minutes later he was snoring.
Caleb drew Marguerite close, gazing at the stars while he whispered in her ear. “I’ve missed you.”
“More than the grog?”
He kissed her neck until she purred. “Much more.”
“More than any other woman?”
Caleb thought about it and gave an honest answer. “By a long shot.”
His hands moved under her shirt, and she cupped his face in her palms. “Now there’s the man I once knew.”
Over the next few days, as they traipsed through the beautiful and unspoiled wilderness of the Barrier Coast, Caleb felt at peace for the first time in a very long while. Happy, even. More so than back home, except for missing his brothers.
And the main reason was Marguerite.
He and the gray-eyed rogue fell into a natural rhythm, made easy by their mutual attraction. They frolicked through fields of wildflowers, bathed in streams, and spent long nights in each other’s arms after the Brewer fell asleep. Caleb loved how she stretched like a cat in the morning and how her brow furrowed as she wrote poetry in her vellum notebook as the sun went down. She kept him laughing and never judged. Even her disapproval of his drunken state in Freetown, he knew, came from a desire to see him whole.
A born storyteller, the Brewer entertained them with countless tales from Urfe and back home. He had traveled up and down the Ninth, from the Sea of Grass to the Burning Desert, from the Lost Islands to the tops of the Făgras Peaks. He had braved a dragon’s lair and explored the ruins of lost civilizations, wooed a dryad princess and played the lyre at the court of a mountain troll king, stolen an egg from a rukh’s nest and sold it to an ogre-mage.
Or so he said. Somehow, Caleb believed him.
One afternoon, a passing line of Devla worshippers, clad in gray caftans and bearing the distinctive triangle of blue dots on the backs of their hands and foreheads, forced Caleb and the others to scurry off the trail and take refuge in the trees. Unlike the last group they had seen, these worshippers carried staves with sharpened ends in addition to their scrolls.
“You’re afraid of them?” he asked the Brewer.
“They’ve never done me harm, but I’ve never seen them armed, either. Makes me nervous.”
“Is there a God in yer world?” Marguerite asked.
The night before, Caleb had told Marguerite that he and the Brewer hailed from a world across the stars. He told her with a sly wink, ready to pretend he was joking, but she took it as she did everything else: calmly, with a dash of good humor and a helping of practicality. That explains the oddities, she had said.
Oddities?
The way you move, talk, make love to me. It’s different, eh? Otherworldly.
The Brewer had explained to Caleb that morning that, in a place where spirit mages traveled the dimensions and fought among the stars, it was easier for people to conceive of life on other worlds.
“We have lots of people who think there’s a God,” Caleb said with a dismissive wave of his hand, in answer to Marguerite’s question.
“I’m no theologian,” the Brewer said in response, “and I’m certainly no saint, but doesn’t being on Urfe make you think . . . I dunno, about where it all comes from? Technology, magic, reality, myth? It seems to me there’s something lurking back there, in the wings.”
“I don’t believe in God,” Caleb said quietly. “If there was one, I don’t believe he’d do this to us.”
“Do what, love?” Marguerite asked, but he never answered.
They had been traveling through a region of sycamore and golden meadows, skirting the foothills of a mountain range. The next morning, just after setting out, they topped a knoll and saw a vast emerald forest sprawling to the north. Not far away, plumes of black smoke rose above the tree line, besmirching the blue sky.
“That looks deliberate,” Marguerite said grimly.
Caleb swallowed, remembering the smoking remains of villages they had seen when he and Will and Yasmina were marched to the mines by wart-covered tuskers. The corpses stacked like firewood beside the stream.
“Whatever it is,” the Brewer said, pointing at the sweep of dense woodland, “you’re looking at the start of the Blackwood Forest.”
Once he entered the forest of his ancestors, Caleb forgot about the ominous plumes of black smoke polluting the sky in the distance. His father’s homeland was the most beautiful place he had ever seen: old-growth oaks and redwoods bearded with moss and lichen, streams pouring like quicksilver through boulder-str
ewn gullies, wildflowers bursting over a rich palette of green.
It made him feel all weird inside. Confused. Longing for memories and a childhood he had never known on this world, yet desperate to see his own home once again.
The farther they walked, the stronger the acrid stench of burning leaves grew. Soon they saw vultures circling a column of smoke rising through the canopy.
Wary of a forest fire or a lingering war party, they cautiously followed the plume into a dirt clearing, where they encountered the smoking remains of a Romani settlement. Judging from the dirt-encrusted stable posts and brick latrines, it was an established outpost.
The Brewer sang a mournful dirge as they walked the perimeter and took in the bodies of men, women, and children splayed around the charred frames of the wagons. A few tuskers were interspersed among the dead, identifiable by their curved tusks and strands of long oily hair knotted in filthy clumps on the ground.
Silent tears streamed down Marguerite’s face as she helped the Brewer study the evidence of battle. Caleb stumbled into the forest and vomited. He waited on a tree stump with his head in his hands as Marguerite and the Brewer finished. The bodies of the children hovered in Caleb’s vision, and he started to shake.
Why would sentient creatures do this to one another? he wondered. Why must there be violence and war?
Why is there so much of it?
Marguerite soon joined him, white-faced and rigid. He took her in his arms and held her as the Brewer finished his lament, giving voice to the voiceless.
“No more than a day or two old, I’d wager,” the Brewer said, when he joined them in the forest. “By the looks of it, the tuskers had a far superior force.”
“What now?” Caleb said, in a toneless voice. He looked down at the pura vida tattoo he had acquired in Costa Rica, on the inside of his left biceps. Pure life, it meant, and he had loved the philosophy behind the popular local saying.
Now it seemed false and shallow.
“I don’t suppose we ’ave much of a mission, anymore,” Marguerite said.
Caleb toed the ground and said, “What if there’s a survivor in one of these settlements? A child hiding in the woods?”