Resurgent Shadows (Successive Harmony Book 1) (12 page)

“Let’s go!” Caleb said between coughs.

They rushed towards the door. Flames roared up around them. They crackled and popped, though not loudly enough to drown out the clarion call of the alarm bells that had resumed their haunting call into the night.

“Caleb,” Rachel said as they reached the door, “our identification cards!”

“There’s no time.”

“Please. They’re all we have.”

“Fine, wait here.” Caleb whirled back around.

The fires blazed all along the walls and licked the ceiling. Billowing clouds of smoke stained the air and clogged his lungs. He dashed back across the room, flames searing the hair off his arms. He scrambled through the pockets of burning wood towards the desk, but groaned in resignation when he got a glimpse of tabletop through the smoke and haze. The papers he’d gathered and on which he’d painstakingly recorded the history of the Charlotte city-fortress were ablaze, curling into blackened ash.

A blood curdling scream that pierced him to the very core cut through the sounds of the roaring flames.

He spun back around and his world ended. A long curved blade poked out through Rachel’s back, the tip shining with blood in the flickering light. Outlined in the doorway from the streets was something from his worst imaginations. A—a—Caleb could only call it a goblin, with its yellow, cat-like eyes gleaming. It smiled as it pulled the sword free and Rachel slid to the ground. Her lifeblood spilled out onto the entryway floor. Benson’s lifeless body slipped out of her arms and into the night.

Something broke inside him. He snapped his handgun up and he put two rounds into the goblin’s head, blasting it backwards into the night. Another leapt up to take its place. Caleb put four rounds in its chest. He ran back across the room, ignoring the heat that burned at his flesh and set fire to his clothes. By the time he reached the bottom another goblin had burst through the door. He pistol whipped it along the side of its skull, and sent it flying. A single shot to the head finished it off. He dropped to his knees next to his wife.

“No!” He screamed in agony, his mind overloaded and unable to grasp what was happening. His heart ached; his brain burst with information, emotion, and anger. His world was ending. Benson’s body lay still and lifeless in the doorway, and Rachel’s breath came out in ragged, bloody gasps, her eyes closed.

“Caleb,” Rachel whispered. Her mouth was a bloody mess. Her eyelids fluttered open and closed. “Where’s Benson?”

He responded without thinking.

“He’s here, Rachel. I have him.” His vision blurred through the tears and he cradled his wife’s head, getting blood all over his blue pajamas.

Rachel smiled weakly.

“Promise me that you’ll take care of him. That you’ll both live and you’ll figure out a way to escape this hell.” Her voice faded as she spoke and Caleb felt a stab of absolute terror and pain.

“I promise, Rachel. I promise.”

The housing unit creaked. The building crashed down around him in flames, sealing him in a fiery tomb with his wife and son.

Caleb glanced up from cleaning the slide of his gun as Sigvid entered the room. The blacksmith nodded in his direction and continued on to his sleeping quarters without a word. They had not spoken much since the night the Raleigh city-fortress had fallen.

In the end, Sigvid had been satisfied with Caleb’s story and had not forced him to look over the edge of the berm at the ruined husk of humanity that remained. The screams of pain, the cries of terror, and the dissonant sounds of death had been enough to unlock the emotional flood and bring back the nightmares in all their radiant glory, each one ending in the same haunting call of his wife’s ethereal wail.

Caleb couldn’t make up his mind on whether he was grateful to or angry at Sigvid for forcing him to live through it all again, for making him realize that what drove him was not the thirst for revenge, but guilt. If anything, it was now even harder for him to force everything back into the corner of his mind because he knew he wasn’t really running away from the pain, he was running away from himself. It was as if a mighty oak had burst from a tiny acorn within moments and he was vainly trying to force it back inside the broken shells. It was a futile gesture.

He knew that he wasn’t really living. Despite his promises, he was merely surviving and, as Sigvid had so pointedly summarized, moving from kill to kill until there was nothing left to kill or else he was killed himself. Right now, that was enough for him. He wasn’t sure what he needed to do to start living again—to start caring—and if he was honest with himself, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to try.

Sigvid, despite his empathy, was not offering any suggestions. The dverger had merely reopened the wound, but left it up to Caleb to discover how best to let it heal.

Sigvid had, however, provided him with something to keep him occupied through the long hours of solitude beneath the rock. The stocky dverger had given over one of the long tables that littered his quarters and surrendered it to Caleb’s use, allowing him full access to all of his tools and equipment and showing him how to use each of them. He had even taken to instructing Caleb in the use of the long dverger daggers, the langsaxe. He made a show of untoward gruffness and hostility for the benefit of the other dvergers around him, but when he was alone with Caleb, he had a softer side that Caleb felt quaintly comforting.

Caleb spent long hours putting the razor-edges on blades, or else cleaning and organizing the hordes of weaponry that amassed around the forge. Sigvid had been pleasantly surprised by how much Caleb already knew. Thomas had taught him well.

After a few days of the toil, Sigvid had shown Caleb how to work the bellows of the forge’s furnace. The steady strokes heated the coals, and thus the metal that the dverger was working, evenly to a white-hot glow.

Caleb found the work mind-numbing, yet rewarding, occupying both his mind and body and freeing him from thought and pain. He was slowly coming to realize that he would never find true healing from avoidance. He had two long years of evidence to prove that. Most of the time, though, he simply did not care. At least the forge work was useful.

When Sigvid returned from the other room he had removed his coat of mail links and had donned his thick leather smith’s vest and trousers.

The dverger was not a warrior, but a Ferreiro, and his presence in battles and among the council leadership was important. Sigvid had explained the title as being a senior blacksmith of sorts. It gave him the right to be present in all the council meeting and influence decisions that concerned the four score dvergers that lived within the Enclave.

Caleb would never have admitted it to Sigvid, but the dverger was a natural leader and his presence was a balm on his normally headstrong and hot-headed brethren. The others tended to believe that all problems could and should be tackled head on, like a battering ram against a wall. Sigvid, on the other hand, was intelligent and quick-witted, always taking the time to think things through and patiently work the difficult challenges before him. He was responsible for much of the current dverger strategy, haranguing the forces loitering around Raleigh in small guerrilla raids and avoiding direct confrontation.

Sigvid took a seat opposite Caleb and watched as he reassembled the slide and slid it back onto the main body of the gun. He twisted the slide release lever back into place to secure it. Then he inserted a magazine and tucked the gun away in a holster at the small of his back.

“We received messages from some of our scouts that a part of the Dragonhosts broke away from Raleigh today.” Sigvid pulled out his pipe and lit it with a small striker he pulled from a pocket. “They are headed southwest. There’s another city-fortress down there, or so we’ve heard. The Dragonlord Mortan-zai arrived there yesterday.”

“How do you know he arrived? You have scouts that patrol out that far?” The words slipped out before Caleb realized that he’d even decided to ask them.

Sigvid smiled a toothy grin around the stem of his pipe and shook his head. “That’s a secret of the stones, boy. I can’t share all our secrets with you yet.”

“You haven’t shared any secrets with me at all yet, Sigvid.” Caleb said with only a hint of mockery at the edges of his tone. “Unless you count the fact that you snore worse than a trulgo who’s swallowed a snoutful of ash.”

Sigvid glowered at him. “You’re one to talk, boy. At least I don’t talk in my sleep and wake everyone around me.”

Caleb grinned, then turned his back on the dverger and picked up the stout pole he’d been working on. It was to become the handle of a battle axe that Sigvid was forging.

He heard Sigvid get up, his bench scraping against the stone floor.

Placing an adz so that it would cut with the grain, Caleb used smooth steady strokes that peeled off thin layers of wood in long spiraling curls. He concentrated on shaping the wood the way Sigvid had shown him, shaving off the smallest pieces until the wood began to take the shape he wanted it to form.

Sigvid spoke of the materials he used—the wood and the stone and the metal—almost as if they were living things. He spoke often of unlocking their inner forms. Instead of shaping the wood, Caleb was setting it free to become the thing it had forever yearned to be.

A few minutes into his work, Caleb heard a rush of air and the crackling of coals coming to life that accompanied the working of the bellows at the forge. He put down the tool and the wood he’d been working and got up from his seat with a small sigh. He walked over to where Sigvid was pulling the long wooden handle of the bellows that breathed life into the coals nestled within the forge’s furnace. He took the handle from the dverger without breaking the steady rhythm of the pulls. The forge and the bellows had been built around the dverger physique, so the bellows handle was shorter than Caleb would have liked, but he’d grown used to it and hardly gave it a passing thought anymore.

Sigvid moved passed him and pulled a pail of minuscule, metal U-shaped rings and a pair of long, thin tongs from under one of the anvils. He thrust one of the lighter hammers into a loop in his vest and with one hand heaved a large suit of chain mail up onto the largest anvil. The suit had been the dverger’s main project since Caleb had started helping him with the metalwork. Sigvid pulled one of the U-shaped rings from the pail with the tongs and thrust it into the hottest part of the coals. His other hand reached into a small pouch of white powder that lay open beneath the horn of the anvil.

He began to chant, his voice deep and strong. Sigvid always sang as he worked. He had told Caleb that the chant was to help keep his work going at a steady pace, but Caleb couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something more involved than timekeeping. The chant echoed off of the walls like no other sound did, as if the very stones themselves were responding to the dverger tongue with a language of their own, a language of echoing power and might.

When the metal was glowing white, Sigvid pulled it out of the coals and, in one motion, hooked it between two other rings on the unfinished mail coat and sprinkled some of the strange white powder over it. The substance flared on contact with the hot metal. Sigvid pulled the hammer from the loop on his vest with the same hand and bent the white-hot ends of the ring together with the tongs. He hit it once with the hammer and the two ends melded together as if they had always been that way, one single seamless whole. The entire process took less than a few moments before Sigvid was on to the next ring.

Caleb had tried to count the number of rings they’d already placed onto the coat of mail, but had lost count after they passed two thousand. Sigvid was quick and methodical in his work. There was only a small patch near the neck to complete.

Caleb fell into the rhythm of the chant and the constant pull of the bellows and was soon lost in its sway. His mind wandered erratically, flitting from memory and errant thought and back to memory again, but never long enough for it to occupy his attention. Sweat from the heat dripped down his forehead and into his eyes, but he hardly felt the sting.

He was still pulling steadily at the bellows an hour later when Sigvid put down his hammer and surveyed his work. It was the absence of the steady staccato sound of metal on metal that made Caleb pause in his heaving and look up, his body flowing with a river of sweat. Sigvid held up the suit of mail for Caleb to inspect. The metal was cool and gleaming, as if it has been recently polished. The suit came down nearly to the dverger’s knees and wasn’t nearly wide enough around the chest to cover Sigvid’s burly frame, but from everything Caleb could tell it was flawless. He realized that Sigvid was waiting for him to say something, but he couldn’t think of what to say so he simply nodded his approval.

“Well, try it on then, boy.” Sigvid tossed the mail coat in his direction.

Caleb caught the coat of mail. He had expected it to be extremely heavy and had prepared for it, but had almost lost his balance when it had weighed little more than a thick sweater. He was momentarily taken aback that the suit of mail had been crafted for him, but then realized if he had been paying closer attention to the suit and not the work itself, he would have known there was no one else it could have fit.

“It’s an alloy of star-iron and a light, shiny metal from your world,” Sigvid explained. “It makes for extremely light yet strong armor.”

Caleb looked up at Sigvid and his expression must have asked the question already forming on his lips because the dverger continued.

“You’re coming with me on a raid tonight. The mail will stop the bullets. In the sleeping quarters you’ll find a padded undershirt and some new clothes. There’s a razor and other things in there too, in case you want to clean up a bit.”

Caleb had been eager to participate in the raids when Sigvid had first mentioned them, an eagerness no less diminished by his recognition of the impetus of his own self-condemnation. It didn’t matter much to him why he felt good killing golgent, he just enjoyed feeling good at all. But Sigvid had almost vehemently denied his requests to join the raids and patrols up until now. He assumed that it has something to do with the conversation they had had the night that Raleigh had fallen.

The clothes were laid out on the sleeping mat that Caleb used, on top of which Sigvid had placed a folded straight razor like the kind old barbers used and a pair of simple shears. There was a small mirror on the floor, leaned back against the wall at an angle next to the clothes. Alongside it a pitcher of water and a shallow stone basin sat recessed in a corner. Caleb squatted down next to the mirror and looked down into it.

A stranger stared back at him. His once lustrous, light brown hair was twisted and matted, covered in the dirt, grime and ashes of months spent sleeping outdoors. It hung down over his ears and disappeared down the collar of his ripped and frazzled shirt, which was so thin that it could barely be counted as a shirt at all. The hairs of his beard and mustache were long, wispy, and stuck out in dozens of different directions like a bird’s nest. Moldy clumps of long past meals and several sections of dried, matted blood clung to his face. The skin of his face, where visible beneath layers of dirt and grime, was sickly, sallow, and pulled taunt against his skull. His eyes, once green and vibrant, were dead and sunken. He suppressed a shudder as the thought came unbidden to his mind of what Rachel would say if she could see him now.

Caleb grabbed the pitcher of water and sloshed about half its contents into the shallow basin and forced the thought away before other memories could surface. It took him a long while to clean the tangles and debris from his hair and beard, but he continued doggedly. He found some soap and a soft cloth amongst the clothes and, after stripping down to just his skin, gave himself a sponge bath before picking up the shears and starting on his hair. It wasn’t neat, but when he finally put the shears down his hair was cropped short and neatly combed.

The trouble came with the razor. He’d never used a real straight razor before and his hand shook slightly at the thought of using it on himself. The blade looked more like a weapon than a personal hygiene tool. After a moment of silently berating himself for his foolishness, Caleb figured out how to hold it correctly, lathered up his face with the soap, and set to work with only a few minor nicks and cuts along the way. Glancing at himself in the mirror, Caleb caught a glimpse of the person he had once known when the world still made sense. He pulled on the new clothes, quickly covering the scars on his back, and donned the coat of mail, cinching it about his waist with a thick leather belt from which he hung his gun and the langsaxe Sigvid had given him.