Palaces of Light (6 page)

A ground that was now solid and unencumbered by the illusion of a wall of rock. It was as if, without Doc’s belief—a belief that he had tried his hardest to deny but had, paradoxically, only reinforced by so doing—the intelligence that had formed the defense had nothing on which to build.

Ryan whistled softly. He turned and looked around at the other three, who were a few yards behind him. Krysty was still hunkered on the ground, while J.B. and Mildred had huddled together, perhaps unconsciously. Their eyes were fixed at a point beyond him; beyond even where Jak stood over Doc’s inert frame, bending over him in solicitation now that the necessary force had been exerted.

Beyond the area where the rock wall had seemingly been, there was an expanse of bare and arid land, scorched and blasted by the hot winds of the nukecaust and still enough of a hot spot for little other than some shriveled shrub to have prospered in the intervening years. And beyond this, where the land rose slightly in level until it formed a ragged lip, there was another chasm. It was a deep, wide split in the earth that extended for hundreds of yards. The shadowed contour of the rock face forming the far wall of the chasm could be plainly seen. It was a gash in the earth that ran in an irregular line, widening and then narrowing along its path. Unlike the earlier illusion, this had the random look of nature, and didn’t veer off at strange angles from the periphery of vision. Unlike the previous chasm, and the mountainous wall, this had dust disturbed in eddies and whorls by the air currents that were stirred by the depths of what was, Ryan was certain, a canyon.

And, with a sinking feeling in his gut, he could have sworn he knew which one.

“Is that one real?” J.B. asked hesitantly.

Ryan swallowed the bile that rose in his throat and nodded.

“Yeah, that one’s the real deal.”

There was something in his tone that made Mildred look at him askance. “You sound certain,” she murmured.

“Makes sense now,” he said cryptically, shrugging. “I never really believed all those stories, but the look of that…and what’s happened to us.”

“Mancos Canyon,” Krysty said softly. “I’d always figured that those stories were just that…not that there was any truth in them.”

Jak turned back so that he was facing her. His brow was furrowed.

“Stories?” he queried.

“I fear I am with you on this one,” Doc agreed. “You speak of these as though they are common knowledge. Perhaps to you. But not to everyone.”

“Sorry, Doc,” Ryan said absently. “It’s just that they were the kinds of tales that you spin around the fire at night, on watches, to stop yourself falling asleep unless you wanted nightmares.”

J.B. walked past the one-eyed man and looked to the split in the earth that lay in front of them. He took off his fedora and scratched his head, lost for a moment in thought. Then, without looking around, he said, “Mancos, eh? Rumors have always swirled about that place.”

Doc was becoming a little exasperated, and it was reflected in his tone. “This is all very well, but if there is some legend attached to this place that may, perhaps, have some bearing on what we are about to face, then I think that you should tell those of us who are not privy to the knowledge. It would, after all, help.”

“I don’t know if you could dignify it with the word
legend,
” Krysty began reflectively. “The region got blasted in the nukecaust. So hot that no one could go near it for generations. But along the way there were those who wandered off the tracks and ended up here. Now mebbe you’d think that anyone who did that would end up as shriveled as an old man’s dick that had been left out in the sun too long. If you did, then you’d be wrong. Most who disappeared into this region were never seen again. Those who were, well, when they were seen again, those who knew them said they were…different.”

The way in which she let that last word hang in the air made Mildred shiver. Different in what way? she wondered. More to the point was another thought, to which she gave voice.

“So you’re telling me that we’re headed into an area that is full of nukeshit still, and from which people either don’t come back, or if they do they’re not even recognizable to their friends?”

“Something like that,” Krysty said in a tone that managed to be both flat and grim at the same time.

Mildred whistled. “Sounds like we’re in for a real fun time.”

“Quite,” Doc added quickly. “But I think the real question for me is, in what way changed? Are we to expect that we will become in some way infected by radiation and covered with sores and distortion of the features? Or will we somehow develop some kind of mutation?”

“Like the ones that you think nearly caused you to buy the farm?” Krysty countered. There was an edge of hostility in her voice. “You think that because it’s evil then it must be mutie traits? You think that’s why these people—the ones who were seen again—were so changed?”

“My dear, I do not know,” Doc said mildly. “That is the sole reason that I ask. Being mutie is not itself a bad thing. You must surely know me well enough by now to know that I would not countenance such a thought. But it would require a kind of power that is only possessed by those who are muties to achieve the things we have seen.”

Krysty gave a short, barking laugh. “Guess you’re right about that, Doc. Mebbe that’s why I’m getting so bastard defensive. Doomie sense is one thing, but this is more than that. Far more.”

Mildred had moved forward so that she was standing next to J.B. “So what was it about those who returned that had changed?” she asked.

Krysty thought about that for a moment before answering.

“They had a darkness all around them. Not just in the way that their attitude to people they had known had changed. They seemed to relate to everything and everyone in a different manner. Even dogs didn’t like them. Come to think of it, that’s a good way to describe it. It was like they looked at those around them in the same way that everyone else looked at dogs.”

“Another step up the evolutionary ladder, another link in the evolutionary chain,” Doc mused almost to himself. “That is an interesting idea. Before the proliferation of fools tampering with nukes, and then the nukecaust itself did nothing more than prove the random nature of nature itself, there was an idea that those who had what we call mutie powers were some kind of preliminary breakthrough to the next step of humanity. So maybe, if those who wander this way survive and are changed by that which lies ahead of us now, maybe they feel that kind of superiority.”

“I’ll tell you what really worries me,” Mildred added softly. “What if the reason they think that is because someone or something is telling them that? Where does that leave us?”

“Up to our necks in shit,” Ryan stated succinctly. “That wouldn’t be the first time.”

“You know, we can sit here and wonder all we want, but the only way we’re really going to find out is if we go and have a look for ourselves,” J.B. said with a faraway tone that was reflective of the way in which he was looking to the horizon, and the gaping maw that split the land in front of it.

Ryan shrugged. His old friend was right, of course. They began the march toward what they hoped would be a real answer to all the questions that were bubbling inside them.

One thing was obvious from the start: whatever intelligence had been working on them, and however it had worked, that was now at an end. The land where the illusory rock carapace had stood was proof enough of this on its own. Where the land that had led up to it had seemed smooth and unmarked, now they could see that the land behind them was marked with tracks that were obviously other than their own—obvious because they now stretched across the space that had seemingly been taken up by rock before, and beyond that across the land leading toward the lip of the canyon.

J.B. looked up at the sky. There was some cloud cover, but it was high and thin, barely more than a haze in places. And hardly moving as it drifted slowly across the scorching sun. Down below, where they wearily and warily trudged across the hard-packed dirt, there was no movement at all in the air. It was still. Perhaps it had been that way for most of the time since the first scouring winds of skydark had cleared the land and left it to chill. Then, as his eyes scanned from the skies down to ground level, he could see the immutable proof of the land’s still nature. The ground ahead of them was crisscrossed by trails. Some were made by human feet, others by the hooves of pack animals. Although it took a moment for the fact to sink in, he also realized that there were no wag or bike traces among the paths that had been trudged across the loose dirt. Maybe that said that the way down into the canyon—where, presumably, some kind of life was possible—was too narrow and precarious for such luxuries.

One thing was for sure: the tracks had been made over a long period of time. There was a massive amount of overlap, where one trail was crossed, often many times, by others. Some were ground deep into the dirt, impacted by repetition so that they ran deeper. But as the land around here was so arid, none seemed to have been baked into mud. Instead, they rested precariously on loose soil that should have made them things of an ephemeral nature. Their longevity said much for the bizarre conditions of the region.

And now they were adding to them. It would be simple for anyone to see where they had been, and where they were going, if they wanted to follow in their wake. But even as the thought occurred to Ryan, he realized that not only was there no place to hide out here on the flat, but whoever lived in the canyon would already know of their presence either because they had been alerted by the defenses…or because they were the defenses.

It was a chilling thought that they were walking toward an enclosed space and people who were most probably aware of their presence, people who had cover while the companions were out in the open.

Perhaps it was his preoccupation with those thoughts that made the distance between where they had started and the lip of the canyon seem to pass by in less than the blink of an eye. Maybe, too, they had increased their pace with the knowledge that they were now within sight of their prey. For there was little doubt that the party they had been pursuing had descended into the canyon. There was a trail that they could follow plainly. It ran from the path that they, themselves, had traversed, and carried on ahead. The number of feet that had impressed upon the land was consistent—the children of the ville, and the men who had taken them.

J.B. thought about what Baron K had told them about the men who had come into the ville: how they had acted, how they had conspired to move themselves into a position where they were able to take the children with no resistance from the men and women of a ville that was renowned for its hard-bitten fighters. He suppressed a shudder at what Ryan had agreed for them to take on. It would have been hard enough to tackle them at any point on the route, let alone to follow them into their own territory.

His mind was still mulling that over when the companions reached the lip of the canyon. The strata of rock spinning away below them into the shadows were layered in geometric patterns that were awesome in their precision. The shadows, too, were layered in this way as shards of light caught on gleaming stone.

Yet that wasn’t what immediately caught the eye. Certainly, it was something even more awesome—and yet completely apposite and bizarre—that caused Krysty to gasp, “Gaia, it’s beautiful.”

Mildred smiled wryly. “Yeah, but it’s got trouble written all over it.”

Chapter Five

Baron K was thoughtful as he left Morgan. The old man had recovered, but had been more taciturn than usual. After his outburst, he had refused to be drawn on what he had seen in his vision state. Even the direst threats that the baron could make—worse than chilling, the torture that preceded but stopped short all the time, suspending him on the edge of oblivion without ever taking the plunge—couldn’t shift him from his silence.

That disturbed K more than anything. If anyone knew what he was capable of, then it was the old man. Trusted lieutenants came and went without much in the way of trust when you were a baron, but someone like Morgan—a seer whose insights were important, and whose cache with a sometimes disgruntled populous could never be an underestimated tool—was an invaluable ally, and as such would be privy to things that it was best others didn’t know. Morgan had seen the worst of the baron, and he knew to what lengths K would go to achieve his aims. The old man had been smart in the past, and had known when to counsel and when to shut up and nod. Never had he been so—what was the word?—defiant.

Whatever the old man had seen, it had frightened him so much that he was prepared to incur the wrath of his baron rather than relive it. For it wasn’t as if he didn’t want to speak. It was stronger than that. It was as though to just speak what he had seen would bring it all flooding back in such a way that would drive him into the abyss of insanity.

K mused that he could make the old man talk. That would be easy. Everyone had his or her point of no return, after which their tongues would be loosened no matter what their threshold and their tolerance to pain.

But what would that achieve? Did he really want to hear whatever it was that Morgan had seen?

He reached his palace. His wasn’t a rich ville, and in truth his home was only a palace in relation to the hovels that the rest of the population had for homes. K may be the ruler of this land, but it was a poor land in relation to much of the rest of the wasteland. The soil was poor for farming and the keeping of livestock, and much of the food they had came about as a result of trade. Not that they had much to trade with. When K had arrived here, it was a ville that was on the verge of extinction. Now it was barely alive and breathing. But it was there, crawling and scratching its way to some hope of prosperity.

It might not be much, but it was K’s own. He had built it from nothing, and intended to keep it that way. To do so he had flexed considerable muscle. So it was that Morgan’s defiance shook him on more than one level. It wasn’t just the refusal, so out of character. It was also the fact that it reinforced that which he had been unwilling to face: his own uselessness in the face of this enemy. Rather than go after them himself, he had been more than happy—no,
relieved
was a better word if he was honest—to let the one-eyed man and his band of mercies go after the children. Even though his own daughter—the one thing he prized more than his own existence—was among the ones taken.

The one thing that K had never been—the only thing that his detractors couldn’t hold against him—was a coward. Yet that was how he felt. He could try to explain it to himself in many ways: he couldn’t leave his people at this time; he couldn’t risk his best men and leave the ville undefended; he was sending the one-eyed man and his mercies as a scouting party for the real raid. No matter how he dressed it up, that sickness in the pit of his stomach remained. It was a sickness that was in part his own loathing of not going after the bastards in person and in part a dread admission of his own fear.

He waved away the servant who came to him as he went through the tarnished and barely disguised squalor of the old house that was his base. It was the largest and best preserved. That wasn’t saying much when you looked at the rest of the buildings around, though. The ville was built around the remains of a small settlement that had serviced some nearby attraction for visitors on the days before skydark. That much was clear from the remains of an old display that took up part of the wing at the rear of his palace. That part remained unused, although at times he had gone in there and by lamplight had mused at the landscape described by the faded pictures and broken models that littered the unused rooms. Had the land around really looked like that? Shit, it had been so green. Just his bastard luck to come along when it was a dust desert.

The servant hurried away. Baron K wasn’t a man to be disturbed when he was in a sour mood, even if it was a matter of great importance. In truth, nothing seemed that important to any of them since the incident involving the children.

K settled down to brood. Maybe he would find some answers as to why he had done nothing. Worse, as to why he hadn’t even seen it coming at him like a bastard great bullet aimed between the eyes.

He started to think back to how it had begun… .

* * *

“S
IX
OF
THE
BASTARDS
, all weird as fuck, coming from out of the chill zone.”

K stopped chewing on the stringy leg of mule that was marinated in grease and a few herbs. Food was never great in the ville, but at least his cook made an effort. She was better than most, and he could put up with her cooking as long as she gave him a blow job after the meal. There had to be something going for her. He could be an indulgent baron. And it had been the thought of this that had been occupying his mind while Higgins spoke. He hadn’t, if he was honest, been giving the sec man his full attention.

The last sentence had caught his attention, though, and made him look up from the plate. He laid the shank down in its thin sauce and wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. Not that he gave a crap about manners, but it gave him a couple of moments to marshal his thoughts.

“The chill zone,” he repeated in a flat tone. “But no one lives there.”

Higgins shrugged. He was a big man, about six-four and 280 pounds, most of it muscle and a lot of it in his head. But he was loyal and—most important of all in the circumstances—he was just too damn stupe to lie. If that was what he’d seen, then that was what he’d seen, no matter how strange or even impossible it might seem.

K got up from the table and walked around to where the sec man stood. As he passed him, he clapped him on the shoulder. “Come on, Higgy, this I’ve gotta see.”

Higgins grunted and nodded as he fell in behind his baron. He’d been a little nervous about reporting to K. When the eastern sector patrol had come back in on their mounts just before sunset and reported the distant group coming across the flatlands on foot, he hadn’t been inclined to believe it, either.

Higgins had fallen in with K somewhere out midwest, when the two men had been mercies for hire. Higgins was a follower, not a leader, and had recognized the leader in K. All leaders need good, reliable muscle as backup, and so Higgins had made the decision to be K’s right hand. It saved him having to think, which was something he wasn’t good at. But by the same token, he wasn’t a complete stupe. He wouldn’t have stayed alive so long if he was. One of the first things that he had learned when he followed K to this pesthole and taken it over was that the lands to the east were beyond all life. No birds flew over them. No animals that you’d want to sink your teeth into, or meet on a dark night, lived on them. And no people. Sure, he’d heard the stories of those who had wandered out there and come back…different. But as he’d never actually met one of those people, or even anyone who could actually have claimed to have met one rather than just heard about it, he didn’t believe it for a second. Just as he never gave more than that second’s thought to what was out there. What the land looked like—shit, it could be flat, dead and dusty between here and the sea for all he cared, as long as he didn’t have to go on it.

So when he figured that he should check it out before reporting to K, he felt fear in the pit of his stomach. It took a lot to shake it off.

He took his horse out slowly, and beat the bastard raw to get back quick. There were six men, of differing shapes and sizes, and they were coming toward the ville on foot.

As he followed the baron out on horseback once more, he felt the unease of a person who really didn’t want to be doing what he was right then. But he had to lead K to them, make him see for himself.

They rode heavily across the dry and dusty earth for twenty minutes, raising clouds into the skies above them. There was no need for subterfuge, as it was plain that if they could see the oncoming party, then that party would have no trouble seeing them.

Visual contact was made after twenty minutes. That made them about seven miles out of the ville. Even in the fading light of evening, there was still enough visibility for the distant party to be a good five or more miles away. That would give K enough time to work out what to do.

He pulled his horse up, signaling to Higgins to do the same.

“What do you figure?” he asked. “It’ll take them a good few hours to reach us. Gives us time.”

“Plenty,” the sec man agreed. “They ain’t much farther on than when I last saw them. Whoever they are, they ain’t rushing.”

K looked ruminatively up at the twilight skies. The sun was now sinking, but even so it still burned in a sky that was devoid of all but the briefest of cloud cover. It had to have been bastard hot on that sunbaked earth. And they would have been marching all day. There was nothing before the horizon that could have given them cover, or from where they could have come.

The baron scanned the oncoming party: two of them were tall, one skinny and one a whole lot fatter—a lot like Higgy, he thought with a wry grin—and the skinny one looked like he was carrying something on his back that towered over his head, making him seem even more angular and accentuated. The other four were all around medium height, and three of them were stocky and not remarkable in any way. At least, not at this distance.

But that left one. And he was one weird-looking bastard, the baron thought, even as little more than a dot on the horizon. He was immensely fat, and seemed to walk with a rolling gait that made him look as though he was about to topple over with every step. It was only the momentum of perpetually falling that kept him moving forward. In fact, the only thing that seemed to keep him on his feet was the walking stick that seemed to extend from his hand like some kind of weird antenna, its point raising puffs of dust as it hit the ground. He walked slightly apart from the others, and K couldn’t be sure if that was because he was the leader, or because the others didn’t want anything to do with him.

He’d find out soon enough, but his instinct was already telling him which supposition was the answer.

“What are we gonna do, boss?” Higgins asked. He didn’t really want to prompt K, or to push him. He knew what he was like, and a more irritable bastard you couldn’t work under when that happened. Even so, the creeping fear in his gut was pushing him. He didn’t want to stay here, and he’d be a whole lot happier when they got back to the ville, and safety in numbers.

K didn’t answer for a moment. His instincts were telling him to go back, get a bunch of men and come back shooting. There was a pall of menace that hung over the distant group. And yet, even as his instincts yelled at him, another voice within him was telling him that they were just a bunch of people, too few in number to be a menace to his well-organized ville.

K pulled his horse around. “Let’s get back and run up a little welcoming committee. Put the men on triple red around the perimeters, get the people ready, and we’ll come back to meet them with six men at our backs. Armed.”

Higgins grinned mirthlessly through cracked and stained teeth. That was exactly what he wanted to hear. He pulled his horse around and took off in the wake of the baron.

They reached the ville to find that word of the men coming from the chill zone had spread like a disease among the people. Despite being told by Higgins to keep it to themselves until he had returned with the baron, the sec party that had made the discovery had found it hard to keep it to themselves, and the itching sense of excitement and unease that they felt at their discovery had soon spread among the ville folk. Most of the people in the ville had lived in the region their entire lives, as had their ancestors. More than K and Higgins, they knew that the chill zone was an area where life was almost extinct. What sort of men could come from there, or even just walk across its unknown length and stay in one piece?

It was a mark of the power wielded by K that he was able to silence the throng that had gathered around his palace. Briefly, he told them what he had seen, and just what he intended to do about it, ordering his sec teams into action around the ville while picking out half a dozen men to accompany Higgins and himself. He sent the team to get weapons from the armory he kept to one side of the palace, and directed the rest of the populace to form defenses. Even as he was doing this, a part of his mind was nagging at him. Wasn’t this an overreaction to what was, when all was said and done, just half a dozen men on foot? Men who would doubtless also be exhausted after what had to have been a marathon trek. Yet there was something about the way in which his people responded that suggested they felt this apprehension, too.

He turned to Higgins as the crowd dispersed. The big man was sweating, despite the fact that the night air was now beginning to cool.

“Can you feel it?” he asked simply. And when the big man nodded briefly, he continued. “It doesn’t make sense, but I don’t want to take chances when it makes me feel like this. Lock and load, big guy.”