Darkwalker: A Tale of the Urban Shaman (2 page)

“
Uh-oh,” said Morgan. “Two o’clock. Dust.”

I looked in the direction she’d gestured. Here and there in the mostly pale brown landscape you could just make out traces of the unnatural reddish-purple dust. In some spots it had turned brick red, like the natural dust you’d find to the northeast of here, as if it had dried out in the sun.

“
It’s turning red already,” I said. “The storm was a few days ago.”

She held out a breathing filter. “You wanna roll those dice?”

I didn’t. Scaledust isn’t something you take chances with. At the sight of those distinctive purple clouds, you put your gas mask or breathing filter on and head for shelter. A day or two after the storm has passed, the dust it deposited undergoes some sort of change—the poisonous organisms in it die, or mutate, or something, and it turns from purple to a dull, rusty red. At that point it’s no longer dangerous. Scientists assure us that after the change, you could safely eat the stuff if you had a mind to, though it likely wouldn’t taste very good. Far as I know, no one has ever made that experiment.

As we rolled into Apache Run, you could tell right away we were on the fringes, leaving the zones. The local ball court showed patches of pale green grass in the outfield. There were actually a few planters with feeble flowers growing in them, and one or two attempts at something that might have been intended for a lawn. Out the other side of town, a dark shape against the horizon, a single Tesla distributor loomed. The few folks on the street were all wearing breathing filters or gas masks, though there was no sign of any scaledust on the streets. Crews with hand blowers would have chased it to collection points as soon as the storm had passed.

The proprietor of the one hotel checked us in.

“
Where would we find Christine Rollins or Ivan Rowley?” I asked him.

“
First Chair Rollins?” he said. “She’s most likely out to the plant.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the Tesla distributor we’d seen on the outskirts of town. “Ivan, he’ll be at his place, the Korner Kitchen, serving lunch.” He was staring at the tattoo over my left eye.

“
Does Ms. Rollins carry a handset?”

“
Yeah, but she usually leaves it switched off. You could try her, if you’ve a mind.” I nodded at Morgan, who brought out our handset and dialed Rollins.

“
Offline,” she said.

“
You’re the Railwalkers,” the clerk said. I nodded. “I’ll send the boy to fetch her,” he said.

“
No big rush. We’d like to see our rooms, clean up.”

***

Wireless signals get pretty spotty in the zones, but the closer to the cities, generally, the better luck you have with them. When she set up in the hotel room, Morgan picked up our messages. She was seated at the rickety hotel table with her equipment spread out on it. Rok had stretched out on the bed, hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. I knew he wasn’t asleep, though.

“
What have you got?” I asked.

Morgan didn’t look up from her screen. “Services for Wiley and Brock. Twilight tomorrow. Nothing about any more information.”

“
Let it go, Morgan,” I said.

“
Come on, guards from both Santa Brita and Monteague, along with a couple of Railwalkers? And no survivors on either side? Man, at least one Ravager, or maybe a turncoat guard, had to have hightailed it into the zones.”

“
Hicks Junction is not our responsibility. What else you got?”

She scrolled the screen. “Roth requests our presence. Urgently.”

“
Micah Roth? Bay City?”

“
Wants us to meet his ornithopter at Maricopa Flats, ASAP. Damned city bosses think they own everybody’s time, like any obligations we have in the zones don’t mean anything.”

“
We don’t have any obligations right now, so what’s the problem?”

“
Don’t you think the locals expect us to be here for Summersend Night?”

“
They didn’t formally request us for that, and Roth did. They called us to get rid of their Ravagers, and we’ve done that. Once we report that to one of the consensus chairs, our work here is done. Time to move.”

“
That’s assuming those kids were the Ravagers they meant, right. Also, there was a message from Dahlia. She wants to know when you can visit Cairnhold.” Cairnhold was the headquarters of the order’s Western Warden.

“
Tell her we don’t know.”

“
It’s not like she’s calling you in for a reprimand. How long are you going to keep avoiding her? She’s older than Traveler. We don’t go see her soon, she could be gone.”

“
That would be a pity,” I said, and I meant it. I liked Dahlia. She was one of the most moderate and level-headed of the order’s Ravens. But it was becoming clear she had her eye on me to replace her when she retired, and that kind of authority was the last thing I wanted.

I heard Rok give a soft snort. “What,” he said, “you want to see Grout as Warden? Or Kane? That would be real good for the order.”

“
I don’t want that kind of post. I’m not Raven material,” I said. “My decisions affect enough people as it is. I don’t want more responsibility than I’ve already got.”

“
But—” said Morgan

“
End of discussion.”

The town had been trying hard to get into an appropriately festive mood for Summersend, with corn dollies hung about the streets and wheat wreaths on the doors. The news that the gang had been killed helped, though there was still a melancholy undertone to the air of celebration. They’d built a big old Corn Guy, one of the biggest I’d seen in a while. Most small towns out in the zones content themselves with a life-sized Guy, stuffing some old clothes with straw and cornstalks, adding a stuffed bag for a head, and tossing it onto a bonfire. Apache Run had built a Corn Guy nearly twelve feet tall, all cornstalks bound together on a bamboo frame.

Ivan Rowley walked up to where we were packing the jeep, getting ready to head for Maricopa Flats. He was staring down the street at the Guy as he spoke.

“
Don’t seem fair,” he said. “We were all looking forward to having you folks do the Blessing of the Harvest for us. Summersend’s only a few days away.”

“
Communication said it was urgent,” I said. “We got a responsibility to city folks, too.”

“
They got all kinds of priests and officials in the city to do their blessings for them.”

“
It’s not about Summersend,” I said.

“
No it ain’t,” said a woman’s voice. “It’s about killing.” Christine Rollins was precise and clipped behind her glasses. “You’ve heard the rumors, same as me,” she said to Rowley. “Killings in the streets of Bay City.”

“
Those killed won’t be any more or any less dead after Summersend.”

“
But others may die before then. Let’s be thanking the Railwalkers for what they done for us, and let them be on their way.”

“
Folks,” I said, raising a hand, “I know City Boss Roth a little, and I don’t believe he’d call a situation urgent if it wasn’t. Truth is, it really doesn’t matter anyway. Our presence has been formally requested, and we’re going. End of story. I’m sorry we won’t be here for Summersend.”

“
Hey,” said Rok, leaning out from the other side of the jeep. “Size of that Corn Guy, at least we’ll be able to see the flames all the way to Bay City.” Everyone laughed, or at least chuckled. “We’ll think on you.”

Storm clouds were gathering as we loaded our gear into the ’thopter. Fortunately they were the gray of the zone’s rare rainstorms, rather than the purple of scaledust.

We climbed in, and Guardsman Geary fired up the engine. There was a brief shudder as the wings shifted into flight position and began to pump, first slowly, then faster, as fast as the small propeller at the back. The ’thopter gave a lurch, and we lifted off, swinging around to head north by northwest as the first raindrops began to spatter the cupola. Geary said nothing, but his grim demeanor suggested Roth hadn’t been kidding about the urgency.

I had met Roth a few years back. As city bosses go, he seemed hard but fair. I wondered if Roth had summoned us because he knew me, or because we’re one of the last full Railwalker teams.

All three of us were in the regulation coats tonight. Yeah, they were a little dusty and wrinkled—what do you want from three Walkers out for weeks in the zones? Except for Rok’s. To look at him in work clothes or fighting leathers, you’d think he was just a big dumb woodchuck who didn’t care about how he looks. But of the three of us, Rok’s regulation Crow coat was the one that always looked like it just came from the dry cleaners. Damn if I could tell you how he managed that. Morgan’s head was on his shoulder, her portable comp unit in her lap.

It was weird to be headed into a city again, after so much time in the zones. I hoped we hadn’t grown arrogant from being final authorities for so long. In the city, we’d be the pros from Dover, but not the final word. We could expect the City Guard to treat us as respected colleagues, but generally they would keep themselves distant and not a little suspicious.

A Railwalker does not seek to grandify the self. A Railwalker seeks only to get the job done. A Railwalker seeks Soul-Are.

INTERLUDE: BRICKS AND CROWS

Although many, if not most, biographies claim Brick never received much formal schooling, did not attend or graduate from any school or academy, and many passages in the
Book of Brick
and
Arteology
seem to be expressed in an academically naïve, if street-wise, voice, it should be noted that aside from the rendering of certain contemporary slang or street phrases, most of the grammar in these passages is essentially sound, and that in some places, simple words are misspelled, while more complex words are spelled accurately. This suggests a writer at least moderately well educated adopting an uneducated voice and tone. If we accept that the Red Raven himself penned the
Book
and
Arteology
, we must also accept that he was perhaps better educated than many sources have led us to believe—indeed, more than Brick himself wanted to appear. Some authorities, like Siblene James, argue for what is known as the “Amanuensis Theory,” which holds that some associate—perhaps even one of the First Five of Ravens—performed the actual writing, either recording Brick’s discourse from memory, or from dictation on which the
Amanuensis
consciously or unconsciously acted as a sort of copy editor.

With regard to Brick’s parentage, we have three conflicting legends. The first is that he was the son of the beloved pre-Crash spiritual leader and popular singer Sariel Mamaji. Another tale relates that he was found floating in a basket in Manhattan’s East River. Yet a third casts him as the son of the Crow Goddess, Morgana.

Since the “baby in a basket” story has no accompanying detail, the Mamaji story is the only one that can be examined for historical veracity. Unfortunately, while much of Mamaji’s life may be well documented, the period in question was one during which she traveled on the road, performing and preaching her way across the then-united country. She worked with a variety of small bands, and records of this period are severely fragmented (see Grafton’s
Life with Mamaji
or Altran’s
SM: A Biography of Sariel Mamaji
). There is no record of any child other than Christopher Johns, born during Mamaji’s Mexico tour, who grew up to take the reins of her Wheel of Life Church from Mamaji’s death until the time of the Crash. And Johns, however admirable a character in his own right, was clearly not Brick. Nevertheless, we cannot rule out the possibility of another child born during Mamaji’s early wild period.

There are, of course, many “Brick tales,” stories of various episodes in Brick’s life, which may take place before, during, or after the Crash. In the years following Brick’s death (or disappearance; see below), the Brick tale entered the arena of popular culture, spawning many short stories, DVs, and comanga. The vast majority of these tales may be discarded as the compositions of imaginative authors, artists, and screenwriters. Within the Railwalker Order itself, orthodox dogma was clear on this point: these tales, even those of the Canonical Raven Texts, as well as the stories of Brick’s miraculous birth, were to be regarded as metaphor, and not literally true. The popularization of Soul-Are and the rise of the Soul-Areists have muddied the waters on this point considerably, since fundamentalist Soul-Areism tends to treat all of the Canonical Texts as received Truth, and literal history. But despite the order’s emphasis on the metaphorical nature of the tales, most authorities today acknowledge the stories written by the First Ravens to be largely legitimate (although some believe that even these tales had historical incidents as their starting point only, and were overlaid with motifs from earlier mythologies).