“I didn’t say…”
Tim hooked a blonde eyebrow to an impressive height.
“Okay, fair. It’s just… I don’t understand. It was all so strange. It was like I was in another world up there, dude. Not like here. Like, just different. My whole context was worthless.”
“The only way to successfully integrate disparate data like this is to follow your hunches and serve them up for debate. You’ll be wrong 99 percent of the time. That’s fine. What did you find?
“Oh screw you, parrot boy.”
She threw a pillow at him. He let it bounce off his thick forearms.
“I’m having a hard time… it’s tough being here and trying to help you. I don’t know enough to actually help. Do you know what I did while you were gone? I went down to the attack site to help with cleanup, but they wouldn’t let me. So I went to the lab to study the atlas but it’s all password protected. So I poked around in the files we do have and found a satellite map of the mountains so that I could go find you, but there’s valleys all over these mountains and I didn’t know where to start. I’m good enough to… I mean… I figured out that Charlie attacked the compound. Even figured out that he schismed like Rachana said. I figured that out. By myself. But no one’s letting me help.”
“Tim, they’re secretive. We’ve been struggling with this…”
“Especially you. You won’t let me help.”
She choked on her next words. Hadn’t she always done this? It was better this way. She could figure it out herself and not risk hurting anyone or worse, have to slow down for them. She hadn’t even told her mom she was leaving the country for an unknown sabbatical in South America. The woman would be worried sick by now. She touched base every two weeks, even if Eliza didn’t, and she had more on her plate than she deserved to deal with alone. And what about her dad?
“You’re right. I’m not good at this people thing. Didn’t grow up playing team sports.”
She tried to ply him with a grin. It wilted beneath his patient stare. Maybe she could throw the glass hard enough to…
“Pachamama told me the story. He was dreaming the entire time. And I left out some details, especially about Takka’s dreams.”
“Why?”
He unfolded his arms and became a kid in a t-shirt and shorts again. How did he transform from boy to behemoth and back so fast?
“Why not? Do you believe these guys? Do you think they give a shit about Charlie?”
“Well, no. Not Rachana. Michael does, I think.” He shivered when he spoke the name.
“He’s dying, Tim. I’ve seen this before. Well not exactly like this, obviously, because the dude’s a science fiction novel, but the mental illness. He’s going to die. They’re just watching him spiral out of control and taking notes.”
“Is that why you panicked?”
“I didn’t panic. The altitude up here and the lack of sleep and the…”
“You panicked.” His arms were crossed again.
“Fine. I panicked. Yeah, maybe. But think about what it means that Pachamama told the story. And the boulders. Put those two ideas together.”
Eliza climbed out of the bed. She was still wearing her clothes from the day before. The boy was a saint but he was still a boy. She couldn’t imagine him trying to make her more comfortable by stripping her down. How much more red could one face turn without it becoming permanent?
She continued when he didn’t speak.
“She said that she had told him the story before and that he just remembered it again. It was like her job was to remind him. What does that mean?”
He ran a hand through his messy hair. It had grown longer in the weeks since she hired him.
“So he trusted her with the story for safe keeping? He knows he goes loopy.”
“That’s one hypothesis. The other, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, is that she told him the story in the first place. It’s her story, not his.”
“How would she…?”
“Think about it. The first story was so confused. Like, I more felt it than understood it. That’s gotta be part of the aerosolized serum and partly because it’s Charlie telling it. It’s what he thinks and feels. But this second story was crisp. The only issue was the language barrier. Her English was… rough. But the details, man. Names and meanings and ceremonies and just, just, everything. It was the way we tell stories. Like it was the priest’s memories, I mean Blue Moon Dancer’s memory. Not Takka’s.”
The names sound archaically lyrical in Pachamama’s withered brogue. In her quick, clinical voice, they sounded like names for some kid’s World of Warcraft character. She tried to hurry past the thought.
“I didn’t notice that. You’re right though. The story is super detailed and clear. The first story kind of,” he wove one hand over the other, “you know.”
“Non-linear. But then we were able to put it together.”
“Right! But this one was linear. Top to bottom. How’s that possible?”
“Well, a lot of ways. It’s maybe a newer hallucination, or I guess memory, for Charlie. So he tells it better. Maybe it matters more to him than the other story, so he spent more time on it. Or maybe…”
For a moment, she was standing against Behema’s living room wall again as a trio of aboriginal people dangled their legs from a stairwell while they watched an ancient Korean man croak a story. The fire crackled behind him. She felt the grand tree’s bioluminescent blue on her skin.
“Maybe it’s been passed down. Maybe what we’re hearing is a retelling of a primary account from someone else who was there.
“Not Takka?”
“They’re the same, Takka and Charlie. Regardless of reality, that’s who he thinks he is.”
“But you’re not talking about hallucinations anymore. You’re talking like this is all true… because of the boulders?”
“I guess…” she found the ever-present valley waiting outside her window. “I guess I am. The boulders add a lot. If he can actually do that himself, or even part of it, Jesus. He’d be inhumanly strong. Inhuman. But what if it’s a direct source? Not Pachamama herself but… Two women left the city with Takka. Quanah, who he had a personal connection with but was already really old.”
“But she wasn’t around for most of the story, so anything she’d know would be something the priest told her in like a day, or that Takka told her,” Tim said.
“Which ruins the idea, right? Then there was the girl. The handmaiden.”
“Blue Moon Dancer’s daughter. But didn’t he say he’d lost her?”
“He said she was in service to the king. Look at the story. We have all this amazing detail from when the priest finds the statue and what I think was the first ten years after. These are all amazing successes in her dad’s life. He’s famous and well respected. The coyote king even gives him what seems like a Get Out of Jail Free card. Wouldn’t you remember that stuff if it was your dad and you were still living in his house? Maybe she was just a kid then.”
Tim slowly nodded.
“Your story jumped a lot. Like, decades. The priest was an old man and he was dying. And I think he’d become like a nut job or a hermit.”
“Or a heretic,” Eliza said. “Lots of religions throughout history have used heresy as a scapegoat for eliminating people and concepts they can’t control. The Catholic Church is pretty bad about… you’re not religious, are you? Oh lord, are you Catholic?”
Tim started to make the sign of the cross but laughed as he crossed his chest.
“Not Catholic.”
“I’m being mean, anyways. But heresy is a big deal in religious societies. No different than burning the Constitution today. It sounded like the priest and maybe the coyote king had some pretty heretical ideas. Like that sacrifices didn’t bring rain, or that there was a big time god above the other gods.”
“So why not just kill him?”
“It sounded like the coyote king’s city had a big falling out and things were tense w
ith Tenochtitlan. They couldn’t kill their canal-building neighbor king, but they did drive him out. And Takka loved Blue Moon Dancer. If they killed him, they might lose their best construction tool. Not to mention the favor of the gods.”
“But they, then, they took the priest’s daughter? To punish him?”
“Or to control him. Handmaiden to the king probably wasn’t a terrible job but it meant she never saw her dad. But she would’ve heard about the heretical priest and the living statue while serving in court. Maybe he did tell her some things before he was sacrificed that day. That’s what Blue Moon Dancer kept telling him. To remember.”
Eliza covered her mouth as she thought about the glinting obsidian knife’s flinted edge stealing the old man’s life.
“So who’d she tell the story to?” Tim asked.
“Her daughter, who had a bunch of daughters who lived for a while. Longevity seems pretty common for non-typical people. Atypical? Unique? We’re gonna need a better name for them. I guess one of those daughters had seven daughters and I got to meet one of them.”
She threw her arms out and fell backwards onto the bed. The white ceiling loomed. She missed the carved rock of Charlie’s room. It was easier to believe all this in a fire-lit cave.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
She kept staring at the ceiling. Maybe he would go away now that the fun part was over and she had a question to chew on.
“What about your panic attack? What about helping Charlie? What about us running out of time?”
WhatAboutThisBoySeeingWhoYouAreWhatAboutYouShowingHimWhatAboutTheAlarmClockWhatAboutTheInsanityOfAllThisWhatAboutInsanityWhatAboutCallingYourMomWhatAboutYourSisterWhatAboutWhatAboutWhatAbout
“Please don’t ask me that question anymore. Not right now. I can’t, Tim. I can’t.” She flung herself to a sitting position. “I can’t. I’m sorry. Something happened to me. Some things happened. Some things are happening. And I’m too weak to talk about them. I can’t. Not right now.”
She waited for him to throw up his hands in frustration and leave. He settled beside her on the bed instead. It groaned beneath his bulk.
“It’s okay to be scared. We’re not weak just because life is hard. But you can’t just run away from it. It’ll catch up to you while you’re running around in the mountains like Indiana Jones.”
“I want to help you,” he continued. “But I don’t want you to get hurt up here. And I can’t… I can’t stay if you’re going to keep doing the solo thing. I’m really sorry. You don’t have to treat me like I’m a doctor or anything but you at least have to treat me like an assistant. And not just for the fun stuff.”
He waited almost a minute. She chewed her lip. He scratched his neck, sighed, and headed for the door.
GoingMaybeNotTodayMightHangAroundWaitShutYourMouthDontSayWhatYoureThinkingWontUnderstandGoingToLoseHimSaySomething
“I’m going to keep working with him! To see what I can learn about how he got this way. To see if he’ll tell me more stories. To see if I can help save him.”
Tim paused with the door handle in his hand.
“I need your help, Tim. Not just for this stuff with him and the Grupo. With me. You said…,” she covered her eyes with her palms, feeling the scars where so many minor cataclysms of stress had left their marks, “you said your sister deals with this stuff and you’ve seen it before so it sounds like maybe you can help me would you mind doing that?”
“That was a little muffled.” He waved a hand over his face. “With the facehugger and all. What’d you say?”
She slapped her hands against her knees.
“I said, I mean, I asked. Would you please help me?”
CHAPTER 20 - THE DRAGONS
Fen tore across the grasslands. He tried to force himself to run on his legs as a man should, but this way felt natural. What else were arms for? His fingers shredded as he ran heedless of the rocks buried beneath the topsoil. There would be time later to heal.
Omduro would not sound the alarm unless something truly dangerous approached. The Leyevi could handle themselves against any common danger. Had Sadanandan finally come to force allegiance from his tribe? Camdzic warned him not to ignore the towering warlord.
The camp appeared at the horizon. Fen forced his limbs faster. He was to the boundary and through it in a breath, and then to his tent. Omduro still blew into the massive coiled horn. He tossed Hemanta’s spear and pointed south. Fen caught the spear mid-stride. He was out of the tent, the camp, and headed for the southern grasses in seconds.
Camdzic stood on the path between the travelers and her home. Fen skidded to a dusty stop beside her. She scowled.
“Where have you been? These travelers come from the south where there is nothing but gobi.”
Fen propped on his knees to catch his breath. He had not wielded his mother’s spear in battle since the dawn of his manhood versus the lion so many years ago. Was this what Hemanta felt when she used it to hunt? Could she feel its strength as he did now? The weapon cried out to be thrown.
“East. Lundoo. Storms coming. Who...,” He drew a deep breath as he straightened. “Who are they?”
“I have not asked. The Leyevi are prepared. We should kill them. The last travelers brought death.”
He looked at the heavy spear in his hand, up at his tall consort, and down the path to the approaching travelers. The day’s high heat still shimmered, obscuring their features.
“They also brought us Hoda, who taught us much about the Berian activities. We were prepared when Sadanandan came.”
Camdzic’s scowl deepened at the mention of her Berian cousin.
“He will return when he is strong enough to make us join him. We should kill him too.”
“Would you kill everyone? We should ask what they are doing here. I will do this now.”
He twirled the spear to point its sharp head at the dirt in the sign of peace as he stepped down the path towards the travelers.
“Welcome! Where do you come from?”
The leader stepped forward. He and his companions were clad entirely in black armor. A deep green traveler’s cloak draped his pointed shoulders, held in place by a shining golden brooch shaped like a curled serpent. He wore a smooth, almost featureless, helmet. Each black surface drank up the light, obscuring what little details the armor’s makers chose to present. Fen expected the matte armor to clink as the man moved but the crunch of dry soil beneath the man’s boots was louder than his muffled armor.
A trick, then. Fen knew he would need to be careful. These were not lost travelers. But then, neither had the last trio been. He still didn’t know which hordes that trio’s message was meant for. Only machines could make armor with such precision. His father taught him this with charcoal drawings scraped onto unwanted goat hides. These were Hollow Folk, here, on the southern edge of the sprawling plains of the Steppe, in his home. They came south from the gobi. They were dragons.
Fen felt his treacherous bowels run to ice. He clenched against them, refusing to let his own iron mask show a flicker of his concern. The Hollow Folk brought lightning to the world. Now, if Lundoo’s words were true, there was more life in this wide world than Fen understood. He needed time to learn, to process, to adapt.
The leader removed his helmet. Air hissed from the black wrapping around his slender neck. There was no time like now.
“Hello,” the smiling dragon said.
He looked like any other man. Fen looked again. His jaundiced eyes matched his sallow skin. It was not abnormal, if that was even possible in these changing days, but it did mark him as descended from the Kitay who lived south beyond the gobi before the lightning came. Those cousins to the Tibetans were destroyed in the early days when the storms still skipped across the vault of the sky. No land was safe.
“I am Leyevi Fen Enkidu. We come together as the Leyevi Among the Grasses. Why do you travel from the south?”
The bald-headed leader turned his neck to conside
r the path behind them. Fen saw he was already sweating. Had he been sweating when he removed his helmet? No, this was new. He sniffed. Testosterone, adrenaline, the unwashed stench of a scared man’s body. More than that, he was sick.
“It was a way to come north. Will you invite us to your tent, Leyevi Fen Enkidu?”
Camdzic thrust her spear point forward. It skipped off the man’s breastplate, tearing his cloak.
“You walk around. There is no room for Koboldi. Leave. Now.”
The man tilted his head as he touched his ear. Fen heard scratching voices come from the air. The man grinned.
“You refuse the paiza. So be it. We will tell the next tribe who welcomes us that Leyevi Fen Enkidu and the Leyevi Among the Grasses refused peaceful travelers.”
The dragon waited patiently. Fen felt the spear shaking in his hand. Camdzic would want to know if her spear could pierce the man’s armor. He wanted to know, too. But there could be no refusal without reason. His mother might be somewhere, just now, asking a stranger for a cup of water, a dry hide, and some smoked eel after weeks without food. The least they could offer was a rest from the sun.
“We do not refuse. Why are you traveling?”
“We are messengers.”
“You are not. The Thundercloud do not wear armor. All peoples protect them.”
The man touched his ear again. The mean smile never left his face, though new red lines blossomed in sickly. Good. The man could not afford a lengthy discussion.
“Not runners. Messengers. You refuse the paiza…. The gerege?”
“No. You will tell us where you are headed first. I cannot allow you into our tent until we know you pose no threat. Healthy children live here. All travelers know the ways of the paiza.”
He heard how false his voice sounded as he used the ancient name for the travel right. All peoples he knew called it the gerege. Paiza was a name from long before. It was a name the Hollow Folk of Kitay would know. It was not forbidden to use this older name but it troubled him.
The Sin Eaters Page 25