Blade Kin (9 page)

Chapter 14: Broken Futures

Over the next four days the people of Smilodon Bay settled into a routine. Tull spent the mornings and afternoons in a field outside town with Fava, Phylomon, and the Pwi. They sparred with swords, longspears, shields, and the Neanderthals’
kutow
—a double-headed ax as heavy as a mace.

The practice field became crowded as Pwi and an occasional human poured in from nearby towns and back country. Often more than six hundred would practice at once, young men and women like Tull and Fava, children from the age of twelve on up, old men who should have fought their last battle ages ago.

Fava exulted at the sight. “Have you ever seen so many people!” she cried over the thump of maces on shields, the clack of wooden practice swords, the laughs and yelps of pain. “Surely we are a great army! The Lords of Bashevgo will never expect our attack!”

Tull did not have the heart to tell her that in Craal he had watched an army pass him on a mountain road taking over six hours just to move the ten thousand warriors with their armored mammoths. “Yes we are growing strong,” he agreed.

In the Rough guns had long been rare, the supply of gunpowder unpredictable. Human Slave Lords who depended on armies of Neanderthals to protect them controlled the dispersal of personal armaments in order to keep them from the wrong hands.

Even in the Rough men who sold guns and ammunition had a curious way of dying young—blown apart with their own gunpowder. The Pwi feared such weapons.

But Phylomon taught them the ancient arts, and in the back of the blacksmith shop they learned to combine sulfur with potassium nitrate and crushed charcoal from the ashes of the forge to form a weak gunpowder. They smelted brass and copper for bullet casings, tin for bullets and with six men working at the forge at six shifts per day, they were able to make crude long-barreled guns like those that the Blade Kin of Craal had begun to use, yet their output was less than two weapons a day.

During the nights Tull and the others kept a tight watch over the town, still hunting the mayor. For nearly a week there had been no sign of him, and Tull was becoming more and more convinced that Garamon had escaped their net.

But on the morning of the fifth day after Phylomon had returned, Tull was still keeping watch on the north end of town, at a communal fountain where the human women washed their clothing.

Darrissea Frolic came that morning, wearing her long black cape. Her face was flushed and sweaty from practicing on the training field with the Pwi.

The gangling human girl was outclassed by the Pwi with the sword, yet she had been working hard during the week. She broke the thin crust of morning ice from the washing rocks, went to work scrubbing a heavy wool tunic. As she washed the clothes, Darrissea talked endlessly about weapons and sword strokes and parries until Tull wearied of her chatter; then she turned to him and changed subjects. “You know Phylomon better than anyone. Do you think he likes me?”

An intensity hung in the girl’s voice, and Tull felt unsure how to answer. “I don’t know. Have you ever even spoken to him so that you can ask him?”

“I’ve thought about it,” Darrissea admitted. “But every time I try, I feel stupid. I want to know how he feels about women.”

“He has married once or twice,” Tull said, “Hundreds of years ago. The kwea of those marriages weighs on him. He loved his wives very much. But he is so old now, so different from us, I do not think he will ever marry again.”

“Oh,” Darrissea said, and she looked dreamily into the sky.

Tull laughed. “Do you like him?”

Darrissea scowled. “Go ahead and laugh. He’s a good man. The first good man I’ve seen around here in a long time. I’m going to marry him someday.”

Tull laughed harder, and Darrissea pulled her tunic from the water and whipped it at him. Suddenly there was a shout from behind the houses west of town, and they both looked up. On the hill a Pwi boy was pointing into town. “Garamon! Garamon—behind the cloth shop!”

Everywhere Pwi took up the shout and ran for the jumbled buildings behind the cloth shop.

Tull stood firm, knowing that with so many guards deserting their posts, the mayor might try to slip through the net. For the rest of the morning the Pwi rushed through the business district, but found no sign of the mayor, though the boy swore vehemently that he had seen the mayor stealing clothes from a clothesline.

When another Pwi came to stand guard, and Tull felt secure that the town was under tight watch, Tull decided to take up his own hunt.

The mayor had owned the cloth shop, but as a criminal his goods had been confiscated, distributed around town. Tull went to the empty shop, which still had bolts of cheap fabric strewn on the floor.

The day was overcast with feathery clouds, and thin sunlight fell cold on the floor. In the silent room, Tull stood, stretched out with his mind. What had Chaa said? “You can feel your enemies, even in the dark or behind stone walls.”

The walls were stone, the room barren, yet Tull could feel Garamon nearby. He recalled the stone walls in Garamon’s home—a hidden passage behind a cupboard, and Tull went to work pulling shelves from the walls. He felt like a dog yapping at mice in a woodpile, frenzied, panting with excitement. He could taste the scent. Garamon was near, the murderous bastard, and Tull could feel him.

Tull pulled the fixtures from the walls, but found no passage. When he was done, he stood, panting, exhausted. He looked up into the rafters of the building. The strong beams crisscrossing under the roof. They offered no place to hide. He looked at the planks of the floor, began pulling them up at random.

By afternoon Tull had exhausted himself, and the sensation that Garamon was near had vanished. Either Garamon had left or Tull had become so numbed to the sensation that it no longer mattered. It might have only been wishful thinking.

Garamon has come out today,
Tull thought.
Perhaps he has run out of food or water. He will come out again.

Tull gave up the search. Walking home, he tried to think of some other place the mayor could hide. The rafters? Could there be a false ceiling above them?

He planned to check in the morning. Tull had left a cloak at Chaa’s house the day before so he stopped to get it. Zhopila and Chaa were gone, along with the children. Probably visiting old Vi or some other friend. Tull went inside found the cloak in Chaa’s Spirit Room.

Thirsty, Tull got the water pitcher, then opened the drawer where Chaa kept his herbs and looked at them. There were three bowls—powdered roots to make him hear, seeds to open his eyes. Even now Tull could almost feel Garamon.

The murderer was near, so near. Tull took a pinch from each bowl, chewed it, and lay down on the floor.

I must open my spirit eyes,
he told himself,
learn to see. Garamon is near.
Tull felt abruptly dizzy, realized that he could hear the ocean outside across the street, the waves lapping, as if he were outside.
I must open my spirit eyes.

Tull dozed, then wakened in a dark pit filled with rubble, bits of broken red brick, some of them whole, all of them covered with lichen in metallic green or flecks of gold.

He blinked, trying to awake from this dream, but he could not wake.

This is the Land of Shapes,
Tull realized, and he peered about in wonder. He tried to fight back his nagging fears, his worries.

The sky was the muted ocher of brass before it is burnished, and distant stars burned in it, dull like flecks of mica beneath molasses. Tull rose, looked out, and found himself in a tower overlooking a barren plain of red rocks—no wind rushed through trees, no lark peeped at the sunset. The day seemed bitter cold.

Around him Tull glimpsed a landscape pocked with similar haphazard towers in the distance, and he glimpsed other spirits, brilliant in hues of purple and silver and fiery red and black, each guarding its little crater of rubble.

The empty land between them looked like the scarred battlefield of some horrible apocalyptic war, a place where plants and life could never be again, a place of age-old broken stones. Somehow, lifting himself above the rock wall caused Tull discomfort, left him feeling vulnerable.

He did not understand what kinds of creatures the other glowing beings might be. Some would pop up above their walls momentarily, only to float down, reminding him by their actions of marmots in an alpine meadow, sticking their furry noses from their burrows to test the air.

The hollow of his soul hovered above ground, a solid dark mass. Tendrils of shadow, like tiny hairs, kept erupting, seeking to escape, but the white lightning flared over the hollow, twisting in a crazy dance, erasing the darkness.

Tull could see his body dimly: translucent hands, fingers, torso. Only the barest of substance, almost a distortion of space. His line of vision emanated from a position roughly where his head should be, but he could spin and view the world in a 360-degree circle without regard for appendages, as if this translucent body were meaningless in this world.

Tull explored his surroundings, the crater that he hid in. Better pieces of brick and blasted stones had been clumsily piled to form a wall of sorts, a barrier that encircled him, leaving scant room for movement. Dark shadows filled the crater, and Tull sank in the darkness.

The ground was muddy and trampled—no clean paving stones for the floor—and beneath the ground a rugged tunnel wound down into blackness, branching here and there. In the tunnel below Tull could see a human skeleton, hand outstretched, carrying a bit of broken stone, as if ready to place it on the pile.

Tull sank into the cave, observed the skeleton, picked clean by ants and beetles, reddened by dust. The room was similar to his cratered tower, ramshackle and haphazardly created, barely able to support the weight of the stones that piled above.

Tull hovered over the skeleton, peered into the dark of its eye sockets. Just beneath the bones, the tunnel branched again, leading to lower chambers, where the white glint of bones hinted at more skeletons in each little chamber.

The silence of the tunnels made him nervous. Tull floated back upward, surveyed the wall around him. A gap on one end showed a place where the stones had fallen, and were in need of support. A stone the right size and shape would do much to repair the wall, and Tull hovered upward, studied the wall, tried to remember the shape of stone he needed. And then floated out of his crater.

Everywhere were stones, broken and twisted, cracked by sun and rain. As Tull floated downhill, he felt amazed to see that there were far more craters than he had imagined, each with glowing spirit creatures inside. Around him he heard popping noises. He wondered what they were until he saw one large stone crack in half. A moment later he saw two other stones silently join together.

Among the craters spirits hovered, and all of them seemed to be trying to build houses, as if piling cracked rock were the only occupation in this land.

Yet most of them failed—they had not built houses or walls at all—instead the creatures sat on the barren plain with only a few scattered rocks standing about them in obtuse piles, contemplating their shelter.

Tull felt intrigued by their witless performance, their inability to form even the most ludicrous of pits. They seemed as mindless as pill bugs.

Tull floated down the valley, crossed the small hill, and in the distance saw a great structure, a twisted tower with vast rooms and open courtyards climbing into the sky. Dozens of buttresses ran up against it in odd places. Some buttresses seemed to turn into long running walls that stretched away from the tower for miles in all directions, all lending it support. The tower stood, convoluted almost beyond recognition, as alien in design as if it had been the handiwork of termites or crabs. At the top of the tower a green ball of flame bustled up and down, busily at work.

A strange compulsion overtook Tull, and he moved toward the tower, floating like thistledown. He glanced down at his legs, found that they were running faster than he would have thought possible, jumping from stone to stone, trying to maintain balance.

Tendrils of light leapt around the hollow of his soul, surging him forward. On some level he understood that legs were irrelevant in this stony land.

Along the way Tull looked at the edifices he passed and in one of them—a tiny hovel upon a near empty field—a yellow ball of flame worked trying to hold a pile of stones upright so that his single wall would not collapse. Tull moved in closer, saw the shape of the jellied clot. It was Byron Saman, an old gentleman from town, and Tull suddenly realized that these hovels and fields of stone were Smilodon Bay, as seen through his spirit eyes.

Tull passed beyond Byron, saw Caree Tech wandering outside a carefully tended little garden of stones set in mounds, one at each corner of the compass.

Tull moved uphill and realized that this great edifice, this towering monument to oddity, could only be Theron Scandal’s inn. It was true that Scandal had, in one sense, the largest house in town, and that Scandal was a man of grand ambitions, but Tull wondered at the towers’ proportions, and glided up a buttress, crawled into an open window. The grand ballrooms had winding staircases and were enormous and solid, large enough so that everyone in town could have fit in one of them. Not like the pitiful structures in the valley below, yet the rooms were empty of furnishings, littered only with bones, human skeletons reddened with dust. Tull floated up the staircases, through room after room, until he came to a small tunnel at the top of a minaret.

The passage above was blocked by the emerald glowing beast, the hollow of a soul massive and magnificent. Green tendrils of flame shot around from it crazily, and the beast toiled and fretted around the tower, building as fast as it could, straightening and rearranging. Tull wondered at this, wondered what Theron Scandal was building. Yet as he floated in closer, he saw that the jellied emerald clot was not Theron Scandal, but Phylomon the Starfarer.

Tull hovered upward, eased around Phylomon, and sat upon a stone wall, looking from the tower, gazing down upon the city of Smilodon Bay: Tull could see better from here, stretches of barren plain where rock had been cleared, sweeping fields punctuated by the grubby dens and hovels of the town’s witless citizens.