Authors: David Farland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Spirit Walker (11 page)
With that he spun and jabbed his sword faster than the eye could see. Denneli staggered back, and at first Wisteria thought that the blue man had missed, but a ragged hole appeared in Denneli’s throat; blood spurted as if from a broken pipe. The stricken man began coughing blood.
Denneli’s children shrieked, and his wife fainted. Phylomon turned to the crowd: “Does Molliron Hart have any brothers or sisters, any relatives at all?”
One woman shouted, “Me!”
“Then in the morning, you will go to the homes of these men, and take possession. Their homes and everything within them are yours. The families of slavers will not profit from these condemned men’s crimes.”
Phylomon stepped up to Jassic, a robust man in his mid-thirties with a thick beard. He could not have been much more than twenty when he raped and sold Molliron Hart. Jassic was watching six directions at once, looking for a place to run; three townsmen held him from behind, and one man had put a noose around Jassic’s neck. He fought the noose, and white spittle foamed from his mouth.
“Anything to say for yourself?” Phylomon asked.
Jassic’s lips trembled. He blurted, “Wait a minute! You can’t do this to me! Wait! Grab him, boys!”
Wisteria searched the crowd. Though several men shifted their feet, none of the “boys” came to Jassic’s rescue. Both his wife and his mistress covered their faces with their hands. Phylomon watched Jassic’s eyes, trying to see who Jassic called to, then rammed his sword up under Jassic’s chin and into his brain.
Phylomon read his second letter: “I, Javan Tech—”
Wisteria heard a shriek rise from her own throat, condemning her.
Her father shouted beside her and drew a knife as he backed away from Phylomon. They had stood near the back of the crowd. Subconsciously, Wisteria had placed herself here so that her father could make a hasty retreat if need be, yet Beremon tripped in his hurry to run.
Tull Genet, that damned half-Neanderthal, grabbed Beremon by the shoulder to steady him, then he must have realized he’d caught a slaver, for he swung Beremon in a great arc, throwing back into the crowd and followed after, still blindly clutching Beremon’s doe-skin jacket.
Beremon’s hands suddenly emptied as he dropped his knife to the road. Wisteria’s mother, Elyssa, fainted, and Wisteria caught her as she fell.
Several young men dragged Beremon forward, and Tull clutched Beremon’s jacket in confusion, still surprised at having captured a slaver.
Phylomon continued, “In Smilodon Bay, while I was walking up the hill at night, Beremon Altair caught me. He and his wife Elyssa kept me in their basement, and sold me as a slave a week later.”
Several people gasped in surprise. Two men took Elyssa from Wisteria’s arms and looked up at Phylomon. “Not the woman!” someone shouted.
Phylomon shook his head, condemning Wisteria’s mother to death.
The young men shoved Beremon to his knees, forced him to kneel in the blood of two dead men. Tull stared at Wisteria in dismay, his face drained white, and she knew that Tull had heard her scream. He knew of her guilt. With a word to Phylomon, Tull could also condemn her to death.
Part of her knew that she should die, and she fought the urge to scream, to confess. She’d only been a child at the time. Perhaps she would gain forgiveness. But she was too much of a coward to speak.
Wisteria felt as if she’d been staggered by a physical blow. Every muscle in her chest seemed to spasm in pain, forcing the air from her lungs in tight, ragged breaths. She was afraid for her parents, and blamed herself. She should have known Beremon would stumble into Tull.
Phylomon waited a moment until Elyssa regained consciousness, and several men held her lightly.
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Phylomon asked. Beremon began weeping and shaking his head, then his back straightened and he seemed to regain his dignity. “I only did it once. My wife is not to blame.”
A woman, Javan Tech’s mother, shouted at Beremon and Elyssa, “Damn you! May God screw you for what you did!”
Beremon stiffened at the curse and said bitterly, “I think he just has.”
Phylomon looked into Elyssa’s eyes. “Did you help take Javan Tech slave? Did you keep her in your house?”
He did not need an answer. Her face was drained pale with guilt. “Yes,” she said.
Phylomon put the sword to Beremon’s throat and asked, “Madam, please turn your head.”
Trembling, Elyssa turned her head to the side and began to weep. Her gray hair looked almost golden in the torchlight, as if in her final moments, she was restored to youth. She peeked at Phylomon’s blade from the corner of her eyes.
“Please,” Phylomon said, “This is hard enough for me. I don’t want you to see it.”
Elyssa nodded slightly and closed her eyes. Phylomon jerked his sword up, away from Beremon, and jabbed Elyssa under the throat, nearly severing her head in one quick thrust, and the audience groaned as one to see the woman die.
“Thank you,” Beremon told Phylomon. “That was kind of you.”
Wisteria saw real gratitude in her father’s eyes, but there was no compassion in the blue man now.
Phylomon swiftly struck with his sword, piercing Beremon’s right lung, then kicked Beremon off the dock, where he floundered a moment in the deep waters of the bay.
Wisteria cried out. Her mother lay sprawled on her back, her head held to her body by only a flap of skin, as she stared at the sky. Wisteria could hear her father in the water, splashing his hands feebly as he tried to stay afloat.
Her legs felt weak, and she dropped to her knees and listened to the splashing, a single cough. “God!” she pleaded, “God! He's drowning! Stop this!” Yet no one moved to help her father. She staggered forward to save him, and someone caught her from behind, wrapping strong arms around her, and lifted her into the air. She kicked him in the shins and twisted around.
It was Mayor Goodman. “Say nothing!” he whispered fiercely. “Don’t step into this mess. Not here! Not now! Later!”
She realized what might happen if she tried to save her father. Beremon quit splashing as he sank beneath the waves. She held her breath, waited for the sound of him surfacing, gasping for breath. But she heard only the lapping of water against the docks. The bay became placid.
Elyssa lay staring up at the moon. Wisteria sank to the ground and began gasping for air, trying to scream.
Phylomon read from the last slip of paper and came up with five names, and three more people died—another Goodman brother, an old woman, and one of the scraggly seamen Jassic had called to for help. Another perpetrator of the crime had died of a fall seven years earlier, and the fifth had long since sailed away.
When he was finished, Phylomon stepped back from the crowd, neck and shoulders hunched as if exhausted to the bone. He said softly, “It never becomes easier.”
The merriment and celebration among the Pwi had long since been crushed. Phylomon wended his way through the crowd, a pariah in the town he had come to save, and everyone stepped back, mothers clutching their children, all of them staring hard at the blue man.
Wisteria felt desolate. As a child, she’d feared that retribution would come, that people would find out that she had carried food for Javan Tech.
Finally, retribution
had
come.
Seven townsmen were dead. Some people in the crowd wept with relief at finding that lost friends and family members, though taken as slaves, had been alive only recently. Others wept in bitterness because fathers and friends, husbands and brothers had been slaughtered before their eyes. Yet no one spoke against what had happened; no one said it was unjust. That hurt Wisteria most of all.
A hundred yards down the road, Phylomon turned to the crowd, and for the first time his soft voice carried an edge. “Many of you children will grow up hating and fearing me—fearing that I will come back again. I will rob you slavers of your sleep.
And that fear of discovery, fear of justice, is what this world needs
.”
That night, Wisteria Altair lost her home to the Tech family. All thirty-seven of them scoured the house, pulling out the beds and furniture, the jewelry and money, the food and family books. Wisteria wept uncontrollably.
By lantern light Javan’s older sister Devina Tech came and reached out to Wisteria. For a moment Wisteria thought Devina was seeking to comfort her, but instead she grabbed Wisteria’s platinum necklace and savagely tore it from her neck.
“I’ll take that, and the earrings,” Devina said, grabbing at Wisteria’s ears. Wisteria wrenched away and slapped Devina in the nose. The older woman looked at Wisteria and her face twisted in rage. “It’s small enough payment for my sister,” Devina said. She reached out as if she would pull Wisteria’s hair, and Wisteria knocked her hand away.
Wisteria took off the earrings, handed them to Devina. “Here,” she said. “You’ve now been amply paid for your sister. I’m sure it eases your loss.”
Devina seemed to catch herself, regain a semblance of dignity. “You can keep the clothes on your back,” Devina said, as if bestowing a gift, and she hurried back to the house.
Several younger family members fought over booty. They were worse than junkyard dogs.
After so many years away from town, Wisteria realized that she didn’t really know these people anymore, yet their actions revealed their nature. For years Wisteria had felt guilty for what her family had done to Javan, had found it hard to look others in the face.
Tonight, the guilt dies,
she thought.
Within an hour old grandmother Tech stood back in the street and cackled, “That’s my house! I’ll live in the finest house on this coast!”
Afterward, in the dark, Wisteria wandered through town, crying softly. She had not eaten lunch after the blue man’s arrival, and had forgone dinner in her worry.
Her stomach began to cramp from hunger. She wandered the streets and found that down by the docks the partygoers had left the carcasses of the pigs still cooking. Many lanterns still burned, and she could make out the streamers hanging from trees.
Finding herself alone, she gagged down a bite of the burned meat, drank a single swallow from the barrel of beer.
Wisteria heard a twig snap behind a house. In the shadows she glimpsed the mayor’s Dryad stealing clothes from a line, her hair and skin silvered in the moonlight. The Dryad wore a long knife on her hip. When she saw Wisteria, the Dryad crept off without a word, heading into the woods outside town. Wisteria wished that she, too, could run from this place.
Wisteria took a step, and something crunched under foot. She reached down and picked it up: a panpipe dropped by a Pwi.
It was all that was left of the blue holiday.
Chapter 9: Under the Cover of Darkness
Phylomon flitted from the shadow of one tree after another as he crept to Moon Dance. He’d killed a few slavers in town, but there were others that he had missed, he felt sure. And then there were the kinsmen and friends of those who had died. More than once, he'd faced reprisals by would-be assassins.
He felt bone weary after treating the farmer’s daughter for a parasitic worm infection, but his very soul felt worn after killing the slavers. For a thousand years he’d been trying to save his people. Sometimes they seemed like ignorant children, too unwise and too willful for their own good.
By the time he reached the inn, it was well past midnight. He sneaked up the hallway to the guestrooms. The floors were carpeted with worn animal furs. After a thousand years of living furtively in the wild, he could move as silently as any man alive. There was no swishing of clothes, no thump of a footfall as he passed. The only sound came when a floorboard creaked beneath his weight. He halted, silent for long minutes so that anyone who might be listening for his return would think that it was only the old inn settling on its foundations.
He warily unlocked the door to his room, keeping as silent as possible. He cracked the door open.
Sure enough, he could smell an intruder, a big man, rank from sweat. He also smelled a tallow candle burning, with a hint of lavender scent—the kind that a whore might use to freshen her parlor. No one rushed the door, so he imagined that the man was hiding. He heard a soft snore, breath catching. He smiled.
More than once, a would-be assassin had fallen asleep while waiting for him. By slow degrees, Phylomon swung the door wide.
On a stool beside the bed, a single yellow candle guttered, burned down to a stump. That seemed odd. Assassins usually didn’t announce themselves that way.
Beneath a tangled pile of blankets, a single bear of a man slept. Otherwise the room was empty. The occupant of the bed was none other than Theron Scandal, the innkeeper.
Phylomon woke the innkeeper with a kick.
“Oh, oh,” Scandal said groggily. “It’s late.” He sat up, rubbing his eyes.
“I agree,” Phylomon said. “I’d heard that this room didn’t have vermin. I fancied that meant that for once I would sleep alone in a bed.”
“My apologies,” Scandal said. He stretched. “I was going to get you some dinner, but you weren’t in your room.”
“You want something more,” Phylomon said. “I can see it in the way your shoulders bunch, and you lean forward. Out with it. I like bluntness in a man.”
Scandal bunched his dark brows in thought, as if he were unused to such straightforward talk. “I’m worried about this trip I’m taking,” Scandal said. “I told you that we had three humans coming with us, but I’m afraid that after tonight they won’t be coming anymore.”
“They backed out?” Phylomon asked.
“You killed them,” Scandal corrected. “Denneli and Coormon Goodman, along with Anduil Smith.”
“Three slavers were going with you? Makes you wonder how much a human innkeeper is worth on the slave blocks in Craal, doesn’t it? I’m sure you would fetch a great price as a chamberlain.”
Scandal’s eyes widened. “They wouldn’t!”
“They planned to, I suspect,” Phylomon said, “yet they were going to too much trouble just to get at you. I suspect that they planned something more.” The blue man bent his head in thought. “With the fishery down, I suppose that some in the town have moved elsewhere. You will have lost some fighting men.”
“Ayaah,” Scandal said. “They’ve been leaving all summer, looking for work down south. I’ve been worried: we’ve got three cannons pointed at the bay, but they won’t do much good if pirates came over land. They could sail a ship up Muskrat Creek during high tide and walk over the hills in an hour. Sixty men of war, at night, could take this town.”
“The slavers
wanted
your quest to fail,” Phylomon suggested.
“Perhaps,” Scandal said. “I’ve never liked Denneli Goodman. If you told me that he rapes babies, I’d likely believe it. But not the others. Coormon—not him. He was a wild kid, but I thought that he’d changed. And Anduil—always seemed a stout man, trustworthy, honorable….”
Phylomon looked out the window, Freya had joined Woden in the night sky, and it was getting lighter. “I killed three men named Goodman tonight. They were your mayor’s brothers?”
“Ayaah,” Scandal said.
“I believe they were in it together,” Phylomon said. “Jassic wanted his ‘boys’ to kill me. He may have been the ringleader.”
“You think that there are more slavers?” Scandal said in disbelief.
Perhaps Scandal couldn’t imagine such a thing, but Phylomon had lived too long. Too often a fair face had hidden a foul heart. Men who seemed saintly were little more than cunning monsters.
“There may be more,” Phylomon said. “And if there are, we should be able to lure them out. Leave an open invitation for other townsmen to join us on the trip to Seven Ogre River. Perhaps our enemies will introduce themselves. I’m tempted to kill the first human who tries to join the quest. But what of the Pwi who are coming? Can they be trusted?”
“The Pwi didn’t choose to come,” Scandal said. “We’ve got a Spirit Walker in town. He ordered them to go.”
“I’ve known many a Spirit Walker who couldn’t look five days into the future. Is this one any good?” Phylomon asked, then realized that he could find that out himself. He could test the man’s skills. If the Spirit Walker had seen the future, then he would know that Phylomon would test him.
Phylomon excused himself from the room, crept outside. He stepped into the street, looked around. With the moons up, there was hardly a shadow in town.
If the Spirit Walker had seen the future, it didn’t make any difference which way Phylomon went, the shaman should be waiting ahead. Phylomon walked up the hill above the inn, through the brush, where the pines hid everything in shadows. A single large redwood stood atop the hill.
When Phylomon reached the redwood, the voice of the Neanderthal came to him from the shadows. “I am here,” Chaa said softly. “I have been waiting.”
Phylomon saw the Neanderthal then, sitting in the shadow of a rock. He bowed to the shaman in respect.
“Sit,” Chaa said. “The night is lovely. It is good to enjoy the darkness while we still can. Soon, a greater darkness comes.”
Phylomon sat at Chaa’s feet and waited for the Spirit Walker to speak.
He knew that Chaa would say only what he desired to say, and Phylomon had seen the vast psychic powers of the pure-blooded Pwi too often to doubt the shaman’s powers.
“You fear to take the serpent journey,” Chaa said, “for you fear that your enemies will destroy you.”
The shaman was perceptive. “I tell you this: Your enemies will have power over you. Time, death—these things you fear. You cannot live forever. You sense that you are growing old, and that your life will fail.”
Phylomon had never told anyone this. His symbiote had kept him alive for a thousand years, and many people thought him immortal, but it could not keep him alive much longer. The Starfarers had had rejuvenation treatments that extended their lives for millennia, but that technology was lost here on Anee.
“The thing that you want most,” Chaa said, “is to save your people, to save them even if they do not care enough to save themselves. This … this can be accomplished. You must walk the path of the crushed heart. If you go on this journey with Theron Scandal, perhaps it can succeed.
“Yet succeed or not, within three years, Phylomon, you will die for your efforts. Your death will be gruesome.
“So, this I must ask you. Will you go in the hopes of saving your people, knowing that it will hasten your end?”
Phylomon hesitated. He’d hoped for another decade or two, maybe even ten. He answered, “I suspect that if we took a poll of the dead, none of them would say that their deaths came easily.”
Chaa nodded. “You have long been a protector of the Pwi.”
“Not just of the Pwi,” Phylomon said. “My people are a danger to themselves. Always they have tried to find an easy path back to the stars, but their road leads them only down. Long ago, when some of our Starfarers proposed taking the Pwi as slaves to build their war machines, I warned them against this. Now, the slavers in Craal have fallen so far …”
“The time has come when you can protect us no longer,” Chaa said. “The armies of Craal swell to six million. All your efforts to stop them will be vain. But Tull Genet can destroy the armies of Craal. I have asked him to go on this journey.”
Phylomon drew a deep breath in surprise. He hadn’t met Tull, did not know the man at all, yet hope suddenly flared in him. “I’ve battled the Slave Lords for eight hundred years, and in all those centuries I have lost that war one slow battle at a time! Their warriors outnumber us a hundred to one. Tell me that you do not speak in half truths! Tell me plainly that my death will mean something!”
Chaa considered. “The paths of the future branch a thousand, thousand directions in a man’s lifetime. Because of this, it is impossible to walk all of a man’s future. Even the best Spirit Walker can only see a few years down the road, and even then he may be mistaken. But I did not have to walk far into Tull’s future. I tell you that within two years, Tull can crush their necks. The armies of Craal can fall. But only if Tull first makes the serpent catch.”
“Then I will go with him, no matter what the price!” Phylomon said.
Chaa said, “I tell you now, the day will come when you regret this decision. Do not be afraid to teach him your secrets.”
Well past midnight, dazed and hungry and not sure what to do, Wisteria found herself beside the Smilodon River. It flowed softly in the late summer, with barely a gurgle, and no sound of waves lapping the shore. The scent of night air and redwoods had crept down from the hills.
Her stomach cramped from hunger, and a chill had taken her. She’d never felt so desolate, so alone.
She was trying to make plans. She was completely destitute. She had an education, knew how to invest and make money, but she’d never had her father’s keen mind for numbers, and now she didn’t have so much as one silver penny.
That left manual labor. She’d never done a day’s work in her life. The family’s cook had bought their food and prepared it. A butler had attended the house. Pwi laborers did everything else.
Wisteria hardly knew how to sew a button.
Who would hire her?
She cast her mind about. There were logging and mining camps nearby. There were fishing boats. A few of the locals produced things—clay mugs, glasswares.
But most of the hard work was done by the Pwi, with their stout backs and strong arms.
She kept thinking of Scandal’s inn. He might want a human serving girl to take care of his human customers. With some diligent work, she might even learn how to cook.
But she didn’t dare kid herself. She had no talent for cooking, at least none that she knew of. And most of Scandal’s women worked upstairs, in the “bridal chambers.”
I wouldn’t be the first woman to make her living on her back,
Wisteria thought. But she doubted that she had a talent even for that. Certainly she had no experience.
Still, there were wealthy people in town who might hire a human girl as a house servant. She glanced uphill, where the big stone houses sat, brooding and monolithic.
At the door of Mayor Garamon Goodman, she was startled to see movement. A candle sputtered in the window to the front room, and a shadowy figure knocked at the door. It cracked, a man entered halfway, spoke quickly, and then crept out.
The mayor himself stepped out afterward, breathed the fresh air, and gazed up at the moons thoughtfully. Thor had risen. She could see the mayor well, the gold chain to his watch gleaming. Then he stepped back into the house.
It was far too late to be keeping company. There had been protectiveness in the mayor’s voice when he’d stopped her from trying to save her father, a hint that they were allies fighting a common foe.
Garamon had helped her father arrange Javan’s sale. He was in this slavery business as deep as anyone.
Suddenly, Wisteria realized that there was another way to make a living—a darker way, one that she had never considered.
She felt angry, hurt, alone. More than anything, she felt helpless right now. She wanted to strike back at the world, hurt someone.
Almost without thinking, Wisteria ran to Garamon’s door and rapped softly.
The mayor jerked the door open. “Again? What—?” he whispered savagely. His beard and breath smelled wet with beer, and he wore a dark cotton robe.
He stood a moment, studying her, and his eyes slowly focused. His sudden silence made it obvious he had not expected her. “What do you want?” Garamon asked softly, as if unwilling to wake his wife and children.
Wisteria did not know how to answer, and then she did, “Vengeance.”
The mayor watched her for a long moment, gauging her. Then he licked his lips. “Vengeance,” he breathed, “can be had in many ways.”
“I want the blue man dead,” Wisteria said evenly “I want to watch the Tech family—all of them—stuffed in the hold of a Craal slave ship, and I want to laugh as I watch.”
The mayor chuckled. “Ayaah, you’ve more spunk than your father ever had, but I’m afraid you’ve lost the family coins. Aren’t you afraid of me? You with nothing to offer, no one to care for you? If I were a slaver, I’d say, ‘She's worth piss in this town. If she got knocked in the head and took a piggyback ride in a sack tonight, who’d miss her?’”
Wisteria studied him. She had nothing to give. She was a beggar. Yet … a week before she’d noticed that Garamon could not conceal the lust in his eyes as he watched the young Pwi women down by the river, as they bent to do their washing.
He’s like a dog that way,
she thought
, always sniffing at the source of joy. So little self control.
Hadn’t her father told her that her body could be a great asset? She opened a button on her blouse, revealing the curve of her breasts, and asked, “A little vengeance. What could it cost?”
The mayor’s jaw dropped, and he wetted his lips with his tongue. She met his eyes, challenging him. He stepped out the door, and closed it quietly behind him.
