Adversaries Together (30 page)

“
She wants her home back.”
Kira barked at him defending her friend but clearly aggrieved at
having to arbitrate between the two of them.

“
I’m doing what needs to be
done. What do you want? You want Goshen back. Well, the most likely
way to see him again is to wait for Jena.”

“
You don’t know she’s
alive.” Kira said.

“
If I’m alive, she’s
alive.” Roth was absolute, his tone defiantly so.

“
I don’t see the reasoning
there, at all.” Fery flicked her hand, dismissing Roth’s
assertion.

“
When you were in the
streets, homeless, days and weeks running like some street rat, did
you know that your father was dead?” Kira asked Fery, her face
stern.

“
No.” Fery said
quietly.

“
Did you ever believe he
was dead?” Kira pressed.

“
No, but…”

Kira turned to Wynne, “Did you ever doubt
your daughter was alive even after you saw the wreckage that was
left in the wake of the mobs? Did you waver when you saw new black
smoke plumes, when you saw more and more desperate people roam the
streets like sick beasts?”

“
I did not.” Wynne’s tone
was level but he watched Kira approvingly.

Roth picked up on Kira’s line of reasoning,
“And Kira, she’s never doubted that Goshen would come back for her
that he would fight to get back to her.” Kira nodded and Roth
turned to face Fery, “So why is it so suspect that I know that if
I’m alive and that Jena is stronger, better than me, then she’s
alive still?”

There was silence but for the flickering of
the flames. Reg reached up to pull the spit off, the rabbit was
well charred, and though hot, his fingers seemed immune to the heat
as he pulled off the meat. He plopped the pieces in his bowl,
picked up a piece and ate it gingerly, blowing on it as he put it
in his mouth. He held out the rest to Kira, and nudged her with the
bowl.

“
I think we all understand
the reasoning.” Reg broke the silence, “But that still doesn’t mean
it’s a good plan.” He seemed uninterested in the discussion as he
ate.

The others chuckled a bit; Roth shook his
head grinning, “I think we can wait for Jena and Goshen there. I
think once they show up, we can put together a proper plan. And if
they don’t, we can still put together a proper plan.”

“
For what exactly,” Reg
chewed a bit, then spit a piece of bone into the fire, “do we need
a plan to do?”

The bowl had made its way around to Roth, who
held up his hand as Wynne tried to hand it to him, and said
assertively “That’s an excellent question.”

Lappala,
20
^th
of Mabon

No part of the city looked well made, and as
you got closer, it appeared more and more plausible that the entire
thing would come crashing down at any moment. From across the arid
plain, the city stood out on the horizon, a grand pillar. For
leagues around in all directions, it was the only notable landmark
and though you moved towards it, you never seemed to get any
closer. This was more a result of the barrenness of the desert,
which had gone from huge sand dunes to a kind of gravely steppe, a
patchy range of a sickly hue stretching for what seemed like
ungodly ages. The sun in the cloudless sky shone unrelenting. Heat
rose up in invisible waves, seemingly racing the wind. Shade was
coveted. The walls of Lappala wrinkled and wavered like some
mocking mirage; an endpoint forever just out of reach.

They had quickly transitioned to traveling at
dusk, night, and dawn not so much to avoid notice as to shirk the
burden of the sun. Other travelers and caravans could be seen miles
off in this part of the world, there was no worry of being ambushed
in this wide-open expanse. When they had first come down from the
Ragans, the evening was proper pitch black. Yet as they moved
deeper into The Aral, evening became less and less dark. The sky
stayed clear, eternally cloudless, allowing the shine of the moons
and the stars to cast an eerie silvery light. But it was the
looming great city on the horizon that dominated the night. At
first, it flickered like a distant torch. Towsend had assumed they
were close as the light became brighter but this was an illusion.
The city was the only thing in the desert, it was huge, and it
filled the horizon with pulsating dome of orange light.

Cochrane and Towsend were now only a few
leagues away from Lappala, the looming, ramshackle colossus. Homes
were built upon homes like a child stacking blocks; there was zero
uniformity, obvious haphazardness rising higher and higher into the
sky. Towsend had never seen such a structure; there was no city
wall, just hard dirt paths from all directions intersecting the
sheer heights. Clothes, banners, wires, planks, and lattices hung
out of nearly every block connecting it to the one next to, above,
and below it. Green vegetation dangled from these falling over the
edges like some kind of vomit as blackened windows released gray
and white smoke from time to time with forms moving about their
banal routines ignorant of their place in the iconic structure. He
gazed up at the city façade and followed the stacks down what
seemed an infinite distance.

“
Getting in won’t be a
problem.” Cochrane said, snapping his fingers for the monocular to
be handed over to him.

“
No?” Towsend asked giving
the spyglass to him.

“
It’ll be knowing where to
go once inside.”

Towsend nodded, “Are there even streets? It
looks too compact; the roads seem to just cut off.”

Cochrane clicked his tongue, “Well, I imagine
each road is a gate, every gate leads to what I guess you could
call a street. It looks more like a crevice though, a crease in the
push of the city’s stacking.”

“
How was this ever made?”
Towsend wondered.

Cochrane folded the monocular and shrugged,
“These are all worker homes, families that have been mining the
quarry for centuries. People who have never known anything but the
city and mine. I guess as you move to the center of the city you
make your way to the mine entrance, and that’s where all the roads
lead.”

“
Makes sense,” Towsend
assented, “So these are homes stacked upon one another.”

“
Infinite and vast.”
Cochrane said.

Towsend nodded, “It’s not just the mine. It’s
this city, these workers.”

“
But it looks
so…”

“
Impoverished?” Towsend
turned to Cochrane.

Cochrane snapped his fingers and pointed at
him, “Yes.”

“
A cartel of some sort
rules here. The citizens only know work and what’s doled out to
them to keep them going.

“
Like I said, there must be
bloodlines that have lived and died here never having known
anything other than the pit and their own shanty. The city is one
great slum. So where does the cartel rule from?”

Towsend smiled, “From the deep black heart of
the city.”

Cochrane turned away and began to make camp
unpacking his satchels for the evening.

Towsend continued to stare at the strange
city, “We’re not going in now?”

Cochrane paused and rubbed his chin, “No,” he
seemed conflicted, “Wouldn’t it be best if we entered during the
day? Once we get in there it’ll seem like night.”

“
Yeah?” Towsend
asked.

“
The shanties rise so high
and are so tightly packed I doubt light makes it down. It’s like a
penitent’s chamber, time moves but you have no real sense of it.
Only those who live on the roof plateau and those out here on the
boundary understand how days pass like we do.”

“
Nothing about this seems
right.” Towsend shook his head and turned away from the façade of
the city.

“
Nothing about it
is.”

“
It’s astounding.” Towsend
sat down next to Cochrane.

“
It will only become more
so, though probably more grotesque.” Cochrane sighed, pointed to a
spot for a fire to be made, and stood up. Towsend started a fire as
Cochrane drove stakes into the ground to hang up the sleeping
rungs. Towsend poured some of his water into a porcelain jar and
then sprinkled a handful of herbs into it from the pouch around his
neck. Without looking up, he asked Cochrane, “Tea?”

“
Yes. And eat the rest of
your dry meat. We need to go into the city with full bellies and as
little on our backs as possible.”

“
Why is that?”

“
We’ll be presenting
ourselves as hirelings. This city attracts only the desperate,
those with no other options. Folks like that never have much and
those that do, by the time they make it here have run through
everything they came with.”

“
So there’s no turning
back.” Towsend sighed.

“
You thought there was?”
Cochrane was surprised.

“
I guess it just really hit
me now.”

“
Once we get inside you’ll
find that there’s more and more. The city is an onion, smells worse
though. And by the time we reach the pit you’ll see what the mouth
of hell looks like.”

“
How will we get back
out?”

“
Once in the pit there are
veins, shafts that go out in all directions, some even meander
their way to the surface again.”

“
Some?” Towsend was
skeptical.

“
We’ll see, eh?” Cochrane
smirked.

Towsend clasped the jar with a pair of metal
pinchers lifting it out of the fire. He nodded toward Cochrane who
grabbed and held out two cups. Pouring the steaming hot water, now
a bright red tea, into each, he set the jar and pinchers down to
the side of the fire. The sun was just down and he felt the
temperature begin to drop; the warmth of the tea was welcome.

“
Drink it up, eat what you
have, and then sleep deep. We’ll enter the city just as the sun
rises.” Cochrane said.

“
What do you think our
chances are?” Towsend asked.

“
We know they’re there, now
it’s just a matter of getting to them and getting them to listen to
us.”

“
And then getting out
again.” Towsend sniffed.

“
And then getting out
again.” Cochrane nodded smiling.

“
Even if we do make it back
to the surface, we’ll be back out in this.” Towsend gestured to the
empty steppe, “The plains are huge. We won’t meet anyone if we pop
out from one of your shafts. The caravans and traders only follow
the roads.”

“
We don’t know the steppes
either.” Cochrane added, “We could just wander farther out into the
barrens, die out there of exposure.”

“
Or maybe find a new land,”
Towsend laughed, “We could discover a whole new world.”

Cochrane’s smile was wistful, “There is no
other world but this one.”

“
True, but we know little
about this one.” Towsend drank the rest of his tea and the two were
silent for a long time staring into the fire.

Setting his cup down, Towsend stood and
stretched. He shook his head with his hands on his hips staring up
at Lappala, “I’m still concerned about this.”

“
It’s a concern.” Cochrane
said coolly.

Siracene Highlands

The morning was cold, and Kira hated it. The
dew or frost or whatever, she thought, made everything worse, she
shivered to her bones as the dampness crept into her nostrils.
Sitting up she pulled the blankets tighter around her necks, mist
hung just over the grasses and seemed to slink into the woods. Fery
and Wynne still slept cocooned in their blankets, the fire pit was
barren seemingly just cleaned out. Roth’s patch of ground was
empty. Kira’s eyes followed the trail Roth’s steps had left in the
wet grass into the woods. She turned her head and looked for Reg,
but only saw the horses.

Standing she stretched feeling the chill
again, and rubbed her upper arms. The sun was about to peak over
the hillside; Kira turned and folded her hands before her chest.
She walked off into the glen to where the shadow of crest line of
the hills dipped, and then she knelt down. As she did so, she
unbuttoned her tunic and opened it up so her chest was partially
exposed. She closed her eyes and began to mutter in a soft, tender
tone. Shade receded as light poured over the rise; Kira was crowned
by dawn. Behind her eyelids, the darkness became a surging red and
then she opened her eyes to take in the golden dawn. She fought the
urge to close her eyes, letting them tear up, as she was
momentarily sun blinded. When she did finally close her eyes, the
moisture from the tears had dried. She blinked several times and
felt a tiny ecstasy, a burn of light.

She finished her prayer and remained
motionless for a few minutes. She let her skin start to surrender
the heat of the new day’s sun, then opened her eyes and buttoned
her tunic but stayed on her knees gazing into the woods. They were
three days into this hill country, moving from coulee to coulee,
and Kira really couldn’t tell where they were moving. Roth had said
that they’d have to move up out of the coulees and follow the
crests. It was unclear why but it seemed as though Roth knew
exactly the path they needed to take.

All Kira knew was that it was getting rougher
and she was getting sick of being out in the wild. She wanted a
proper bed and proper food. Thinking of this she winced, and felt a
blush take over her face. She shook her head trying to rid herself
of the selfish desires. Then she looked again to the hilltops, it
was clear that the terrain was getting tougher and they were moving
into higher hills. These birch forests were odd, such thin trees
with such bright white bark, they stood tall and their leaves were
so vibrant. Kira was enthralled by the reds, oranges, and yellows;
in Sulecin the forests were nothing like this, they were thick
towering pines. She took it all in, the new light of the day making
everything more vibrant.