Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (9 page)

“They’ll try to turn them,” Evelyn said, coming to stand beside him. “The ones that they don’t kill. We’re going to be fighting our own flesh and blood soon enough.” Evelyn was a woman who held her head high even at the worst of times, but right now her regal veil fractured, and her shawled arm wrapped around him. “For the first time in my life, I don’t see a way we can win.”

Alexander folded his hand over hers. He had no words of comfort left.

Who could have known they would end up here? Of all their accomplishments and victories, the thousands of dedicated people across the land that had fallen under their banner, precious little remained. All they had brought to bear was on the brink of going up in flames.

It hadn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, when the echoes of the Old World were still fresh, they had been almost unstoppable.

The hammer came down on the chisel with a final clink, and the engraving was complete. Stretching some fifty feet across the sheer face of the rocky bluff, the Latin alphabet stood capitalised and proud. It had taken two hours of painstaking work to etch the letters, and finishing touches had delayed them twice as long.

James Chadwick stepped back, admired his handiwork, and wiped his brow. His critical eye picked out niggles and imperfections from start to finish, but he knew it would do; it was more than satisfactory. He had chosen his site carefully, within plain sight for half a mile around, yet sheltered from the elements. Fortune granted, it would last some hundred years before weathering began to blur its form.

He inspected it critically, trying to see it from the point of view of virgin eyes, those who might stumble upon it in the high grass, once the ruins of the Old World had crumbled to dust. Would they see what he saw—see the beauty, a window to a whole world of knowledge and truth? Here before him was something the people of the Old World would have taken for granted: a key to the sumptuous bounty of the mind. Even if he and his kind failed to pass anything else down through the ages, here was something that might provide a window to a new beginning. This was one of many fail-safes built across the land, just in case it all came to nothing.

But that would never happen as long as he had a hammer to hand. Not as long as Alexander Cain drew breath.

“Crooked,” Alex called from the ridge afar.

“It’ll do.”

“When they bow down before these letters in ages to come, you might think different.”

James rolled his eyes and stared across the meadow at his silhouetted form. “When they make statues of you and me, we’ll see who’s worrying about neatness. It’s all there.”

“That it is.” Alex rode across the meadow, his white steed parting the tall wheat until he was abreast James’s chocolate colt. “There might be hope for us all yet.”

“Even if we lost everything else?” James thought of the vast stores of books that lay in the libraries he loved so dearly, his childhood playgrounds; the vast treasure troves that lay locked amidst moss-covered underfunded public shacks.

“It’s happened before,” Alex said. “Mankind has lost all sense of itself time and time again through the ages. But no matter how far we’re knocked down, we always find our feet again. It might take decades, centuries, maybe millennia, but we get there, if we have but the simplest tools.” He planted his hands on his hips and surveyed the alphabet emblazoned on the stone rock face. “Cornerstones like this, they’re all we ever really need.”

James had heard it all before, enough times for it to roll off his own tongue and into the ears of countless young’uns who gathered to hear their oratories wherever they bunked during their travels. Yet to hear the words straight from Alex’s mouth never lost its charm, that unique spark that seemed forever undiminished. He really was a relic of an older world, one gone from this Earth. Oftentimes, to hear Alex speak was to be at peace.

“You packed the capsule like I told you?”

James nodded, kicking the dirt mound at his feet. “Just like all the others.”

“You’re sure?”

“Do I look like an amateur?”

Alex reached down from his mount and clapped him on the shoulder. “Only in a certain light.”

“You can be a real arsehole when you put your mind to it.”

“Practice, my friend. Practice.” His white mare wheeled around and headed back into the wheat stalks. “The sun’s getting high. Better move. We have a long day ahead.”

James nodded, but his mind was elsewhere, on the steel box at his feet, covered in a mound of fresh dirt. Beside the alphabet was a sizable arrow pointing to the very spot where it lay buried, filled with a few vital trinkets; the OED, writing implements and carefully wrapped paper, maps marking the sites of bank vaults they had filled with literature, poetry, philosophy and scientific texts, and sealed their heavy doors with thick films of resin. Such tombs of wisdom would last for hundreds of years, at least long enough to endure the ravages of any new dark age that may befall the world, with any luck.

Trails of breadcrumbs. That was the way Alex taught it. Start small, let those who sought the light come forth of their own accord.

Their lives were secret lives, under the reign of barons and feudal chiefs and blood feuds, the cruel stirrings of the Old World’s remnants. After the End, the remaining populace had clumped into villages, clans, and gangs, and while many clung together in innocent hope of a peace, the strong had begun to prey upon the weak.

They lived under the radar, moved in shadow, and spread their message in stuttered whispers.

“James,” Alex called. He was already some distance away.

James uttered a non-committal grunt, still eyeing his work. Alex was right; it was crooked. His lip curled at the thought of such shoddiness, and a moment of inadequacy brought with it a resentment he couldn’t quite place. Then he was seeing it with fresh eyes once more, and a more chipper air fell over him. Mounting his colt and parting the corn stalks in pursuit of his elder brother’s trail, he left the rock behind, forever marked by the words of man.

They rode hard for an hour or more, crossing endless wild meadows and young sapling forests that had once been cultivated farmland. The morning’s engraving hadn’t been their primary item of business today and had taken longer than James would have liked. Now they were in danger of being late.

The sun was directly overhead when wisps of campfire smoke appeared on the horizon. The meadowland ahead buckled into a corrugation of rolling grassy hills, and upon the peak of one, where the grass was downtrodden in many places, the tops of chimneys and thatched roofs came into view. They slowed their pace and waved to a few field hands returning home from nearby orchards, nestled in the lee of a valley. Though they received welcoming smiles in return, James saw Alex shift his rifle around from his back and under the duffle swinging at his thigh.

Reluctantly, he did the same, keeping one hand on the safety. Even among friends, firefights were still common over simple misunderstandings, even misrecognition. These were dark times.

But as they rode higher and their view of Newquay’s Moon fleshed out into narrow alleys, rickety plank-walled huts, stables, taverns, and bunkhouses, James’s apprehension melted away. Excitement squirmed in his gut as they rode into the centre of the square before the water tower, where the populace was gathering. The day’s comings and goings stalled in a trice, and people came running. Any break in the monotony was welcome.

Already, he was searching their muddied faces while Alex bade them all hearty greetings. He too smiled and waved, but at the same time he searched for one in particular. It had been hell being away from her so long. She had plagued his thoughts every minute of these long weeks.

He spotted her off to the left, sandwiched between a pair of gruff, filthy farm hands, a head shorter than the rest of the crowd. One moment all he saw was the ash blond crown of curled locks, and then the crowd parted some, and there she was. Eyes like polished steel, pale skin in perpetual blush, a jaw too rugged to be wholly feminine, but hardy and well-formed.

James almost forgot himself by waving to her. She was no classic beauty; her hair was matted from work and she was dressed in a muddied Old World tunic, the cheap product of factories that had once enslaved great droves in the East—clothes that had carpeted all the land after the End. But James was intoxicated. A beast once unknown to him clawed up from the depths of his subconscious, pulling a primal red blindness over his eyes. He wanted to touch her, feel that hair between his fingers, her skin on his.

But at the same time, there was something else, altogether different. It was a stoicism, a kind of peace that nothing else could bring. It was the looks she gave him. Beth Tarbuck was one of those people who brightened up the world just by having been born into it. If she had been born in the Old World, she would have been the sole desire of boys for miles around—not for her looks, but for her smile, her laugh, and the look in her eyes that only few people can give, one that can make someone feel truly understood.

She smiled for the merest moment, so fast James wondered if it had been his imagination, followed by a wink just as fast. Then her face was plain as the rest, filled with the same adulation as the rest of the crowd. Before he was aware of it, James had nickered his mount forward, drawn toward her. A wave of dizziness washed over him, the hand on his rifle forgotten. Hands were slapping against his legs and horse as people cried welcome, and he mumbled back, but in his mind, he was already over there with her, climbing down from the saddle and taking her in his arms. His chest felt swollen with something entirely unlike air; it was like soup, thick and expanding, filling him up. And elsewhere, other feelings stirred his flesh.

“James,” Alex called. His voice cut through the haze, snapping the link between James and the golden tunnel separating him from Beth, and then he was blinking amidst a sea of faces, bombarded by a racket of voices. “Come on.” Alex had already turned away. He hadn’t noticed anything.

James cleared his throat, making a renewed effort to smile and shake hands with the traders, aides, mothers, and scavengers below him. But his eyes were still drawn to the left, to the very same spot, furtively stealing glances at her whenever he could.

All the while she remained immobile, the shadow of a smile lingering on her lips, watching him. When it proved too much for him and he once again made to inch forward through the crowd, she shook her head almost imperceptibly. Her eyes flashed.

Later
, they said.

She turned in a flash of icy gold, leaving an impression of thick lips, grey eyes, and a smile to light up the world frozen in the air. When he looked again, she was gone. In her place were only the beefy paws of the farm hands being mashed together in great booming claps.

Drunk on the afterglow she had left in the air, even from thirty feet away, James made to carry on in Alex’s image, but couldn’t quite shake the stupor that had fallen over him. They reined up by the stables and James dropped to the ground, taking a feed bag from the head stock keeper with thanks and attaching it to his mount’s muzzle.

“Glad to see you both, young masters!” cried Malverston, town mayor four years running. “
Elected mayor,”
he proudly announced at every opportunity, though no election had ever been held. He was an enormous near-spherical man with a grimy beard that ran down to his navel in tangled greasy spiracles. His beady black eyes latched onto Alex and James like leeches. “Always a thrill, always. What news of the world?”

James cringed inwardly at the exaggerated falseness, the grandiose antiquated exclamations. Malverston was full of them. He thought himself some kind of generous member of the gentry, a relic from the eighteenth century who was embarrassed to find himself of good fortune and chose to mingle with the commoners. But James knew better. They saw his kind all too often.

“As always, Mayor, there’s plenty to tell and little time to tell it,” Alex sang over the continued hum of the crowd. James hated these pleasantries, pretending friendships that were simply not there. Alexander Cain was no songbird, but a quiet, pensive soul. He would be a great man one day—they all said it, wherever they went. James would be lucky to be half the man he was when he came of age. Yet this eternal front he put on in public, the showmanship, it was all a lie.

But it was all part of the mission. That was the way they had always done things. And all things told, James was glad to endure a little falseness if it meant success. He had a destiny, after all, and he would do anything to see it realised. The world relied on the precious few like Alex and himself. If they failed, a new Dark Age would sweep over everything in a generation.

“And you, my dear Mr Chadwick! You’re looking more strapping by the day.”

James nodded and called on his practised diplomatic smile, honed to perfection over countless iterations. But his body seemed gummed up, his mind still on Beth. “Mayor,” he stammered.

He caught a confused warning glance from Alex and shook himself, squashing Beth’s face from his mind.