The man laughed. Fen saw himself hurling Hemanta’s spear into the man’s open mouth. It would ruin his face, pinning him to the dry dirt as the Leyevi swarmed his companions. The man would never be hungry again. No one but the Leyevi would know.
“North. West. Away from South. Never east. There is nothing for anyone in Hanguo.”
He and Fen winced at a shrill squeal. The leader cupped his ear.
“The Kobold. So many names for so many places in this wide world we all love. We will share our message with you, if you will be our host. What is your decision?”
“Come.”
He turned for home. Camdzic swung the spear around to Fen’s neck. He caught its sharp blade in the spikes of his wrist. Bone chips and the spear bounced away. Fen continued walking.
She trailed trail several strides behind the silent travelers who still wore their own faceless helmets. The leader kept pace with Fen as they headed for the tents.
Fen did not know the sounds of their peculiar accents but he did know the sounds meant the leader borrowed the language he now spoke. His words twanged like a bowstring. The peoples of the Steppe spoke as many languages as there were tribes but all shared a common root that sounded like poetry to the chieftain. Their shared language only sounded ugly when a distant foreigner spoke it. Dread Jonah hadn’t bothered to continue learning the evolving language. His speech was ragged by the end of his life. Jonah would have known how to handle these travelers.
“Where is your home?” Fen asked.
“Please, chieftain. We will speak when we settle at the tent. It was a long journey. We are thirsty. Perhaps you have entertainment for us?”
Fen growled. The man frowned but did not speak again.
The trio settled in a circle under the center tent. The war party that greeted them sat in front of them, as was tradition. None involved could turn their backs on any others until the conversation finished. The Leyevi returned from their sentry posts in the fields to stand watch outside the tent.
A second traveler removed his helmet. A smooth white face appeared, flushed red from his exertion. His blue eyes darted from face to face. Pale folk were common enough. Two sick travelers in machine-hewn armor, though, had not been seen in generations.
The third traveler revealed an ebony face beneath his matte helmet. He was bald like the others but with a long braided beard. A line of round bumps ran along his high cheekbones. He dipped his water bowl in the shared pot and then dipped his head as he lifted the cup high.
“Thank you for the gift of water. My name is Hasaan Al-Wara.”
His voice was high like a young boy’s. It twisted in on itself when he paused to breathe.
“You are from Africa. Are you from the Cradle?” Fen asked.
Lundoo shuffled behind the trio of men while they spoke. Fen locked eyes. The tired healer nodded. He chose a seat behind the travelers. None could see him unless they turned their backs, insulting their hosts.
Hasaan Al-Wara arched a thin eyebrow.
“No. My ancestors come from there. No one... lives there now.”
“You sound like your leader.” Fen nodded to the patient yellow dragon.
“We are from the same place,” the leader said.
“Where is that?”
“South. It is across the desert, beyond the Tibetans, and into the fertile fields below. It is a place you may not go.”
The Leyevi began to murmur. Neither Fen nor Camdzic knew what to say. Already the travelers confounded their certain knowledge of the way of things. People did not come across the gobi. But then, cities were no more, at least until an hour before when Fen was still mourning Jonah and ignorant of the wider living world.
He glanced through the travelers to Lundoo. The healer rose, seated himself, and rose again. Fen threw the weight of his will into his impatient glare, saying nothing but requesting, in as certain terms as he thought his eyes could show, that Lundoo step forward. This was his world, after all. The chieftain felt smaller than he ever had. Even the cursed bedroll of his crippled childhood still held the promise of truth. But now, he knew nothing.
“You speak well, I suppose, for dirt chewers.” Lundoo hobbled to stand beside his seated chieftain.
The trio turned to find the speaker, ignoring the norms all folk respected. Camdzic ground her sharp teeth. Fen did nothing to stop her. He did not like these men. His knuckles itched for their blood.
“No? Ni weisheme zai zhe? You have nothing smart to add?”
Lundoo’s clipped, breathless Novgorodi vanished. A twanging disharmony replaced it. Bright blood shined on the wan leader’s pale gums as a broad smile covered his face.
Fen started to defend Lundoo from his own people but froze. The Leyevi would not move against Lundoo for his lies while these dangerous travelers visited. Besides, he could protect the healer every day of his life if he wanted. It would not take much for a suspicious Leyevi to slip hemlock into the old man’s tea. He knew he could not stop such things. There were no laws. Perhaps the healer had a point.
“Ni laizi nali?” he asked. Where are you from?
Lundoo looked to Fen. He chose to wait. The healer had ruined their theater. They could not resist revealing their superiority. Such was the way of cruel children who caught a rabbit in their snare. They would torment the thing while feigning salvation.
“Wo cong Lundun lai,” he continued. I am from London.
Fen saw the leader’s vacant stare falter as he glanced east. A thin line of dark clouds validated what the chieftain had been smelling for several minutes. The distant storm blew west towards them.
“Chengshi tongyi ranfg zhexie ren gudu. Ni weifan xieding!” Lundoo was nearly screaming now despite the oppressive atmospheric silence that had descended. The cities agreed to leave these people alone. You violate the pact!
Lundoo spat each word. Would the travelers respond? Fen hoped they wouldn’t. Refusing a request for conversation not once, not twice, but three times was all the justification he would need to cast them from his camp forever. Then Camdzic could do what she pleased with them beyond the bounds of the Leyevi camp.
“Tamen tai duole. Zhe shi yige jinggao.” The African spoke. They are too many. This is a warning.
“But how will they know? You have never sent a message before! Zhe shi cuo de!”
Lundoo’s brittle voice cracked as he argued. The man was defeated, scared. Lundoo was many things, a known liar among them, but he was not weak. He walked across the whole world to be here. He carved a niche among the Leyevi when many despised him. He confessed his lies to Fen and stood still to accept his punishment. And he stood here, now, arguing on their behalf against armor-clad dragons from a long-dead land. Something was deeply wrong.
Camdzic pressed her spear against Hasaan Al-Wara’s armored chest. The sharp tip skipped from his armor. She dragged the point to rest beside his exposed neck. Fen darted between the African and their nameless leader.
“What is this? We welcome you into our home. What message does Lundoo speak of?”
His thorny hands found the leader’s armpits, lifting the startlingly heavy man into the air.
“Tell me now.”
The leader’s yellow eyes shuttered. A rapid clicking sound filled the air. Fen realized it came from the man’s chest.
“We have sent this mess... message to… to… to other tribes... tribes. Horde grows... grows… grows large! Too large! Stay... stay... stay out of homelands... homelands… stay... stay… n... nor... north of gobi.”
The leader’s eyes clicked shut. When he opened them, blue light streamed out.
“This is your only warning. Long hui duohui diqiu!”
The African shifted his stance, whirling a hidden dagger towards Fen’s ribs. Camdzic’s spear separated his head from his shoulders. The twitching corpse collapsed at their feet. A stench of burning hair rolled out on the smoke seeping from inside his armor.
The Leyevi swarmed as the pale man bolted. He was beyond the tents
when he vanished into a flash of colorless light. The swarming warriors tried to stop themselves from colliding with the light but tumbled forward as a fireball bloomed from the light. Black clouds swirled over the explosion.
The leader’s hands clenched and unclenched too fast for Fen to see. Blood dripped from his knuckles as blue light surged from inside him. It glowed through the thin places in his exposed skin. Static crackled from his metal-capped teeth.
Lundoo pointed his trembling hand to the western sky.
“Fen, they are guaiwu! Monsters! He brings the storms!”
The storms had been in the east just moments before. Now they surrounded the tribe. A biting cold wind whirled through the tent, bringing with it the unmistakable odors of ozone and snow. But everything faded int the furious bee-like buzz of the leader’s chest.
“We are sorry… sorry… sorry... You must… must… be warned. Warned…”
A fleshy crunch cut through the whirring. The man’s glowing eyes began to steam and then smoke as his body went limp in Fen’s grip. The chieftain’s thoughts flashed back to another field, years before when Jonah still lived and the world was small and known, watching the sick pale man catch fire while Omduro dragged poor Hoda away. He could hear the broken Armasar’s sobs, as he had so many long nights after, sobs unlike any he heard before or since. She mourned for her lost purpose.
That messenger brought fire and pain. The man in his hands brought lightning.
How had he not noticed before? The hairs on his arm tickled him since he woke that morning. His skin rolled as he sat on the hill with Lundoo. Danger.
The travelers before were lost, injured, starving. These men were sick but wore armor, were foreign but spoke his language, were human but chose darkness. Danger.
His eyes found Camdzic looming over the slain African. She was why. So was the stinging sweat in his eyes, the slow fire growing again in his chest after many healthy years, the gifted spear his mother left behind, the late summer breeze that carried the hint of winter, uncounted nights spent beneath the canopy of stars, and a thousand other visceral details that made his world sing its endless serenade. Danger.
All this had distracted him. He could never let it happen again.
Fen wrapped the man under his strong right arm. He sprinted away from the tent, away from where his people burned with the pale man who had exploded with light, away from everything he knew. The dragons used their dark machines to put the lightning itself inside this man. They sent him with a message. The people of the Steppe were too many. The earth was not as endless as the sky. The lightning finally found them, as Dread Jonah taught him. Who knew the lightning better?
The only sound was whirring. The wind, the screaming, the beating of his own scared heart all faded beneath the whirring. It sounded as though bees as numerous as the stars in the sky screamed their angry song inside the man. Fen felt the motor thrum its siren song as he carried the danger away from everything he loved.
The whirring spun into a whining squeal. Vomit rose in his throat. He choked it back as he ran farther, faster, fighting the urge to run on hands and feet because then he couldn’t hold his lonesome burden. His world exploded.
The fireball that was the messenger flung Fen away. He saw, in the passing way a child watches a leaf float down a stream, that a hot blue globe of light scorched the grasses in a growing circle. He collided with the earth. Cruel, unfaithful air rushed from his collapsed lungs. He hooked his craggy elbow to stop his slide.
Lightning pummeled the place. It slammed into the ground, each time rippling out farther until the orb became a column of violent light. The black sky broiled around the distant reach that was the lightning’s origin. Each blow rippled the air. Sound became numbness. Static tendrils leapt from the column to scorch anything it could reach. The lightning hunted them.
His mind told him to help his people. They had to be burning. One bolt brought many, like serpents from the sky, like dragons. He could not move. He had to bear witness. This was the lightning. This was what the boy Jonah saw eat his tribe. This was what came for the cities, the technologies, the ways of the Hollow Folk. It did not matter how they made it. It was here. It could not be stopped. The lightning would grow forever until it consumed him and the tents and the Leyevi and the countless people and then the whole world.
The column thinned to a flickering ragged bolt that became many smaller bolts as the earth drank up its wrathful energy. The black clouds burned away. A scorched ring provided the only proof. The demons from the sky vanished faster than they came. Nothing remained of the messenger.
Fen rolled forward but collapsed as ribbons of pain coursed through every nerve in his aching body. He coughed, bellowed, and watched a thick grey wad of bloody phlegm fall from his mouth. Each movement made his cells scream.
Before, when the lightning lashed its merciless power onto the unsuspecting world, he felt nothing. Now he felt every synapse and nerve, every cut, every shift in the quiet wind, every blade of grass beneath his aching knuckles, and for one eternal moment, worse than any day spent as a crippled child coughing out his lungs as he waited for the Yuush to reclaim him, he wanted to die.
He pressed his palm to his side. No blood. He smiled, until he saw the tacky organic glue that formed bloody ropes from his palm to his aching ribs. His sticky flesh tore.
Camdzic was sprinting to him. Most of her hair was scorched away. Her left eye was burned. Her mouth moved but he could not hear her voice. He reached a hand to her. She needed his help. She was hurt. She should not be hurt. He needed her to be here. The Leyevi needed him.
She gasped as he raised his arm. They looked down together at the scorched ruination of his ribs that ran from the jagged bones on his elbow across his armpit down to his thick waist. Gooey charred flesh marred the place she rested her head at night. He saw but could not hear her scream as he collapsed into the grasses.
CHAPTER 21 - VOLCAN WOLF (FIELD WORK)
The volcano’s slope continued its inexorable climb. It would scrape the heavens and touch the gods hidden in their imaginary homes, Eliza thought. How high was it? Charlie had told her. She usually remembered these things.
VolcanWolfIsTheHighestPeakInTheGalapagosIslandsItClimbsTo5600FeetIsabelaIslandIs...
She let herself smile. Maybe Wikipedia was more memorable than Charlie. Tim was right. The little devil inside her thoughts could be helpful. She tried to stop fighting it. The devil grew stronger when she rebelled. It tended to spew a thought and then leave her alone if she would just let it. But leaving things alone itched.
Charlie’s extensive lead on her widened. The man seemed built to climb. His disproportionate and indeterminate frame looked silly in the contexts of hallways, chairs, and uniformity. Out here in the wild, he looked more natural than the mountain itself. He scrambled over obstacles, across ravines, and up sheer stone walls like an ape in the jungle. She caught her breath as she watched him move. He was happier out here in the sunshine and fresh air.
The flight over had been difficult. She hadn’t imagined he could react so badly to the sight of the open ocean. Hadn’t the man lived in Lima for a lifetime or three? No, that was silly. Even after weeks spent with him on these brief final excursions to the wild places he had once visited throughout his labyrinthine life, she couldn’t accept his story.
It wasn’t possible, after all. The severity of his schizophrenia was real. The extent of his body’s mutations was undeniable. But he wasn’t the millennia-old wet dream of evolutionary theorists.
He had relaxed as soon as the helicopter landed. That was how these trips always went. As soon as his feet touched soil, he was happy again. What would he do when the stolen habitat ship broke orbit and there was no soil to be found? Maybe he could fantasize over the red dirt of Mars, adding another planet to the list of places he would never be, or be again.
She realized she was digging her nails into her palms. Why did this bother her so much? She had known him less than two months. It
had been an intense two months, heavy laden with expeditions to the Amazon, the Nazca lines, to his favorite ceviche shop in Lima where a squad of elderly patrons fed him plate after plate while peppering him with questions, twice more to Pachamama, but still just two months. It took years to care about a person like this, if she ever cared at all.
He waved a long, heavy arm at her. She cinched her backpack’s straps and chased after him. They had reached the caldera. Her legs, by now used to prolonged abuse with little oxygen after so many weeks spent on expedition with Charlie, hardly whimpered their muted protest. Her chest burned, but not too hot, and a Pacific wind dried her mild sweat.
“See! I’m adapting too! Maybe I can grow a wonky nightmare gland and we can keep hanging out!”
Charlie growled as he collapsed on the lush emerald grass of the northern slope. He wrapped his long arms around his raised knees without sparing a glance at the sprawling hole in the top of the burning mountain they just climbed. She wanted badly to look but decided to wait. It wasn’t every day you got to hike an active shield volcano, peer into 700-meter deep caldera, or feel the heat of the earth’s spinning molten heart on your face. She settled beside him. There would be time to explore before they headed back to the compound.
BarelyTimeForAnythingNowRunningOutOfTimeDaysLeft
“What’s on your mind, chief?”
She knocked her knee against his but bounced away. He let his body run slack most of the time, more like a lazy dog laying in the noontime sun than a leopard tensed for the kill. The rigidity in his body meant he prepared for a threat, real or imagined. She scanned his neck but found no hint of the purple stain. His dark pupils were still dark and the whites were still white. He watched the ocean.
“You don’t seem to like the ocean very much.”
He said nothing. She knocked his knee again.
“Tell me. That’s what we’re here for. You’re sharing stories and I’m listening.”
He was definitely lost in his memories. These melancholy moods could be worse, in their own way, than his hallucinations. At least the hallucinations had a chemical basis, the external influence of an internal malformation that she could define. The melancholia came from real and imagined memories she could not yet access. She felt the vibration of his faint growl seconds before he spoke.
The Sin Eaters Page 26