Powers (22 page)

He hadn’t mentioned this to Mel. He didn’t plan to. No need to add to the ton of doubt they carried. But, he had to assume that sense could be something Mother planted; it could be Legion, ditto; it could be some unknown Tertium Quid acting with some unknown third purpose.

It could be a guide or a trap or totally irrelevant.

Which side are you on?

He handed the binoculars to her, so she could see the camp for herself and draw her own conclusions about this land.

She poked another note under his nose.
Where the hell are all the people?

Albert went back to searching the forest, bit by bit by detailed bit, from his nest underneath a thick old maple tree, hoping she did the same from her post on the other side of the trunk. If he was a god, why the fuck couldn’t he see behind him? Everything about this place made him twitchy. So many things were . . . off . . . about the whole scene, including her question. Why so much empty forest? Where had those fireflies come from? What made some of the tracks they’d crossed? No animal he’d ever seen . . .

And they had people with guns chasing them.

They were still using scribbled notes, even though his hearing was getting better. Slowly, but better. He’d actually heard a crow or raven just a few miles back, croaking imprecations as it flew off when they disturbed its crow-business. Must have been
really
loud complaints.

She had backup pads and pencils in the pack, so they didn’t have to swap back and forth to carry on a conversation. Albert shrugged to himself.
No people
meant
No people shooting at him.
That was great. He’d forgotten how much he hated having people shoot at him.

He still couldn’t remember where and when he’d learned that basic truth. Where he’d learned the skill-set of a scout or hunted prey surviving in a hostile land. The damned Seal wasn’t weakening fast enough for so many memories to come back. Yet.

He chewed on the second half of his bacon bar, deferred from “breakfast”—just a compressed brick of fat and dried meat but he preferred it to the beef bar because of the salt and smoke flavor. Which was strictly academic at this point, as they had now finished off her supply of both. She’d packed a week’s food in the most compact, high-energy form she could find, meat bars and bar solid chocolate and walnut meats and such, all things that didn’t need cooking, all vacuum packed and stable for long storage. That meant, a week for one person. Which looked an awful lot like three, maybe four days for two.

Tomorrow, they started hunting or started going hungry. Free choice.
What
they would hunt was a different question. They’d have to find some animal as deaf as they were, with the amount of noise they must be making, not able to hear the crack of a stick underfoot or the shuffle of dead leaves. Or something with defenses like a porcupine, that didn’t damn well care. Not enough open space to see game before it heard them.

Can a god starve to death? Interesting theological debate. I’ve never tried. But then, I never thought I was a god before. Not sure I do now.
He wiped his fingers on his pants, swatted a persistent mosquito, and picked up pad and pencil.

We’re in Siberia.

He chose that as a generic big empty place with trees. And mosquitoes. Besides, the one place they
had
seen people, yesterday, looked a hell of a lot like a Soviet or Czarist labor camp. Not a death camp, not the Nazi thing, no gas chamber or crematorium, but none of the workers got paid and nobody but the bosses ate anything like decent food or enough of it and if you died, nobody important cared.

But this was good land. Not the Russian taiga, where you couldn’t do anything with the miles and miles of trackless boggy bug-infested land
except
grow trees on it. Slowly. This was northern hardwood forest, decent soil at worst, and if these kinds of trees grew well on it, the climate wasn’t too wet or too dry, too cold or too hot. The kind of land people grabbed, white people or brown people or black people, when they found it. And, if they could, killed off any prior inhabitants who objected.

Another one of the things he couldn’t remember was that he couldn’t remember how he knew all those things.

She took the pad and wrote,
They have airplanes. They have helicopters. They have railroads. Why don’t they use this land?

They’d seen a flight of four helicopters headed in the general direction they were running
from.
None of the choppers strayed from their flight plan, none of them seemed to be searching. They’d seen jet aircraft overhead, contrails high in the daylight or blinking lights high at night. Flyover country. Nobody in any hint of a descent or takeoff pattern.

Or searching pattern. That baffled him. And her winds reported emptiness in the forest around them, just the deer and other game and predators you’d expect. And not very much of
them.
One of the odd facts he’d picked up in his centuries—a mature forest didn’t support much wildlife. You got more deer, for example, in cut-over or burned-over land where the food grew within reach. In late spring or early summer, all the chestnuts and acorns and the like on the ground had been picked over. He’d found an un-chewed beechnut or two, cracked them, all empty hulls. The squirrels knew. They were professionals.

She’d finally admitted that her hearing was shot to hell, too. Admitting her injuries was . . . a weakness, he guessed, un-godlike behavior. Just admitting it took her a full day, and she’d looked ashamed when she scribbled it out in the early twilight. They’d been talking—well, scribbling—about standing guard in the night.

Another note from her.
That logging camp. Doors looked like they were built to keep things out more than in.
She paused and pulled her notepad back. He hoped she was paying more attention to the forest, to standing guard, than to her writing.

My winds don’t recognize anything I don’t know, but they see things I don’t know. Same as back at the bunker. I told you they sensed something out there. It wasn’t the guards and booby-traps.

Now she was admitting that she lacked omniscience. Next thing to go in the godly triumvirate would be omnipresence, he guessed. All this humility was probably good for her character, bitter as she seemed to take it.
He’d
never felt like he was all-knowing or all-powerful or everywhere, but he was a trivial god at best.

Not like Mother.
She’d
never admit there was anything she didn’t know, couldn’t do.

He scribbled
Dragons?
and passed it to her.

Once again, choosing a generic title for the whole spectrum of big unknown dangers. Maybe he should have gone with evil djinn haunting the wastelands, but she’d told him to lay off the cultural and Qur’an references. He didn’t feel up to coming within an inch of killing her again. A quarter inch.

The note came back.
Here be dragons? No. Dragons would leave trails. Tracks. Piles of dragon shit.

They hadn’t crossed any trails or tracks larger than a large deer. Elk, maybe, or moose, cloven pointy hoof. Not reindeer, those had rounded hooves. These critters looked
heavy,
judging by tracks at one of the marshy areas, softer ground but not
that
soft. Also something like a bear, broad pads and toes with claws, weight similar to the moose by the depth of the print, but the track didn’t look quite right to him.

He couldn’t remember where he’d learned to read tracks, either.

She moved around the tree where he could see her, turned her back to the arc of forest
he
could watch, and scribbled some more. Conversation works better when you can see faces.

Look. Those trackers we killed? Winds say nobody followed them. Bodies just lay there. Food for ravens and crows.

That
gave him second thoughts. He already knew she hadn’t been telling him everything. Sometimes ignorance could indeed be bliss.

She was writing again.
Apologize for not telling you. I’m used to living with humans. If I tell them everything, they go crazy.

As if he wouldn’t go crazy. But if she was going to start apologizing for things, he’d have to start thinking of her as a person. Not just a royal pain in the ass. Upsetting to his worldview, that.

Those guard towers with the big searchlights. Biting things that don’t like lights. Hunters who had quit chasing two murderers from another world. A song, maybe fifty years back, about a sheriff who didn’t worry too much about a fugitive in the Everglades—if the mosquitoes didn’t kill him, the snakes and gators would . . .

No windows on the ground floor, not even rifle slits. A lot of insects seemed to stay close to the ground.

He wrote:
Fireflies?

She cocked her head to one side, thinking. She didn’t wince while doing it. The bruise on her face had faded, and his own aches were settling down to a background murmur.

Maybe. Or something like them. Some reason why people don’t dare live alone out here, can’t hunt and fish. But if that’s it, why haven’t they attacked us?

He thought about the few game trails they’d crossed, the animals they hadn’t seen, about the scarcity of game her winds reported.
Not enough food? They have to hunt more territory, so we haven’t run into them? Yet?

Or they didn’t attack in masses until their scouts had time to gather a swarm together. Like in the tunnel. And then he remembered the cemetery, all out of proportion to the size of the camp that fed it. With fresh graves, judging by the heaps of dirt. At least they buried their dead, which implied they hadn’t been eaten alive by the fireflies.

Disease?

She stared at his note. She stared at him. He wished she would go back to staring at the forest behind him.

Mosquitoes transmitted yellow fever, malaria. Bugs carried other nasties: dengue, sleeping sickness, dozens of diseases—hell, fleas transmitted plague.

Something transmitted by fireflies, maybe?

She stared at his added note. Stared at him. Then scribbled.
I don’t get sick. Do you?

That sort of implied that she bought it—plausible working hypothesis. He tried to remember. He’d been injured more times than he could count, but sick?
No. But these aren’t our germs. Don’t know if they’re obliged to respect foreign gods.

Then:
No fireflies in our world.
He swatted another mosquito. They seemed to think his blood would work for breeding purposes, human or not.

What diseases did this crew carry? If the hypothetical Big Boss God had a master plan, why did He or She have to include so damn many parasites? The last creek they’d waded across had leeches, equally interested in minor-god blood.

Could tie into the apparent brown tint to the population. Wouldn’t have taken much more to wipe out the first few waves of European colonies—both Jamestown and Plymouth tottered on the edge, and the Spanish focused down south where they could steal the silver and gold.

She was scribbling again.
Just keep moving.

He nodded. That had been the prescription in that old song, as well.

Addendum, from her note pad:
Which way to the Seal?

Decision time. Trust that buzzing annoying ache in his molars, the shortest route to the Seal, or trust the unknown source of the smell that wasn’t a smell, the sandalwood?

I’ve always thought salamanders were like friendly unknown cats met on the street, walking up to me expecting a chin-rub and ear-scratch before we go our separate ways. I should trust one for tactical advice? Elementals aren’t that smart. Am I following a salamander, or something else? To what end?

Which side are you on?

He pointed a bit south of “east” and the railroad line—the direction the sandalwood told him. The railroad would be the path of least resistance. The sort of thing Mother would set up.

That was east by Mel’s compass, anyway, and it agreed with the observed data. Like, sunrise happened off in that general direction. Plus, it still led away from the bunker that had guarded against their entry. Putting more miles between his ass and the guns suited him just fine.

Any idea how far?

He glared at her. Shook his head.
I’ve never done this before. It’s getting weaker. I’m probably getting stronger. I didn’t know how far away it was when we started. All I know is, we’re closer today than we were yesterday.

He grunted his way to his feet, leaning on the cane. All this backcountry mileage, chancy footing and up and down and around hills, irritated his hip. As the other aches died down, that one grew and grew. Downhill actually seemed worse than climbing, a side effect of the shorter leg, and orthopedic shoes didn’t soothe all the difference. Just keep moving, as long as the land didn’t throw a wrench into their gears in the form of a wide river, a gorge or cliff they couldn’t pass, a swamp like the one in that song.

Or even a damned ocean. He felt the Seal, but like he’d told her, he had no idea how far away. All he knew was, it was closer. Closer than an unknown distance still added up to an unknown distance. Half of infinity is still infinity.

If it faded away, if that crack broke all the way through and killed it, would he lose the tracking of it? He didn’t have experience to judge, not even a guess. In theory, observer interacting with observed, as it grew weaker, he grew stronger. Maybe he’d even be able to find it if it broke. When it broke.

If he believed Mother.

Who, Mel reminded him on a regular basis, wasn’t his real mother—who had been damned flexible in her interpretation of the truth in all the years he’d known Her, in other ways as well. Centuries.

But he was beginning to think “when” rather than “if,” the longer this took. What the hell would he do with broken magic first dreamed up and then forged by Suleiman bin Daoud?