The Crimson Skew (16 page)

There was a whistle as his sword cut through the air. Sophia felt a wave of terror. She dropped to the ground and covered her head. “Errol!” she cried. “What are you doing?”

The air above her moved. She looked up, hoping to see Errol's hand reaching down toward her. But it was not Errol's hand. Instead she saw giant talons, set in iridescent green skin, grasping at the thick air. Sophia gasped and tried to get her bearings. She dimly recalled open doors perhaps twenty paces ahead—and she stumbled. A shape moved above her. She caught a glimpse of a massive wing cutting through the fog: brilliant with red and orange scales. Then, as she crawled forward unsteadily, the beast's face suddenly appeared beside her. It was blue-skinned, with a long snout, golden eyes, and a set of massive jaws.

Its long teeth like knives bared, the dragon spoke:
“Sophia.”

Sophia choked on a scream. She pushed herself to her feet, rushing blindly into the fog. Disordered thoughts ran through her mind. The story of Tree-Eater flashed before her: the monster conjured by imagination.
But why would I imagine a dragon?
she asked herself, panicking.
I didn't! I didn't imagine a dragon, I promise!
She wanted to cry out to Errol, but she feared drawing
the terrifying dragon-creature toward her. Unexpectedly, she heard Errol's sword ring as it hit stone—the marble floor of the station?

She hurried toward the sound, hands out in front of her. It was not far. She heard the ring again, and a grunt of effort. She had reached him. Sophia dove in a final burst toward the sound. Then she looked up in horror. She had not found Errol. This was something else: a giant; a massive statue made of iron. He leaned toward her, his helmeted head with its closed visor emerging from the fog. The iron giant lifted his sword—
Errol's sword
, Sophia realized—into the crimson mist, preparing to strike. Sophia froze for a moment, mesmerized.

Then she bolted.

As she stumbled in what she hoped was the direction of the doorway, the din around her suddenly flooded her ears: roaring and clanging, screaming and wailing, the echoing report of pistol shots. Sophia felt a sob rising in her chest. She ran as far as she could before her foot caught on some person or thing hidden by the mist and she fell, sprawling forward onto the ground.

S
OPHIA LAY ON
the ground, her senses battered by the horrible sounds that echoed through the station. Now that she could hear them, they overwhelmed her, like a wave that filled her mind and pushed out every other thought. Dimly, she understood that Goldenrod, Errol, the pirates, and Wren were somewhere in the confusion, but although the realization made her anxious, she could not think what to do with it. She could not even comprehend what it meant that they were
there, in the midst of the fog, with the dragon and the knight.

The two creatures she had seen loomed in her mind, coming into focus. From somewhere that felt terribly remote, as if it had happened long, long ago, she suddenly remembered words of significance:
When you see the knight and the dragon, you must think only of your own safety. Your instinct is to stay. You must flee.

Who had spoken these words? Were they from the Ausentinian map? No—Sophia did not think they were. But then where did they come from?

Maxine
. The name came like a breath of clean air.
Maxine said the words to me, only a few days ago.

Sophia clung to this thought; it seemed the only thing she could trust, for she could not trust what was happening around her, and she could not trust her own senses.
Safety.
She opened her eyes. She was on the marble floor, curled around her satchel. The red fog was beginning to settle, leaving a thin scum on her fingers and clothes. Around her, the screams and terrible sounds continued.

Sophia urged herself up onto her hands and knees. Directly ahead, she realized, there was silence. The sounds were behind her. Moving inch by inch, she crawled away from them and toward the silence. Her palms struck the floor of the station blindly, and she dragged her knees along behind her. She kept her head tucked down—there was nothing to see if she raised it. The sounds behind her, although they continued to echo, seemed to grow a fraction more remote.

Then there was a sound ahead of her—a footstep and a low laugh. Sophia looked up slowly, dreading what she would see.
There was nothing—only red mist. And then the mist parted briefly, and a white figure appeared: tall and regal, wearing a full-length dress and a long veil that obscured her features. Her hands were gloved; her delicate fingers moved gracefully, parting the red mist as if brushing aside a branch. She nodded gently, and her movements were terribly familiar. As she reached to lift the veil, the fog consumed her once more. But that momentary glimpse had been enough.
Blanca,
Sophia thought, horrified.
She survived. She's here. She's
here.

Sophia scrabbled blindly away. She heard the footsteps following her, easy and assured, unhurried.
I have to get away from her. I have to get away from her. I have to get away from her
.

The single thought pushed her forward, through the red mist and into the unknown, still crawling on hands and knees. Suddenly her hand touched something firm and somehow rubbery. Sophia recoiled in horror.
What is it? What is it? A hand? A foot?
She stared down at the object, and the nature of it slowly, slowly dawned on her.
A potato,
she said to herself, as if assuring herself that it really was.
A potato.
She touched it experimentally. It did not change. The red fog swirled and parted: an overturned vegetable cart appeared. A large crate of potatoes had fallen from the lower shelf, half its contents scattered. Sophia crawled toward it desperately, even as the fog again descended.

Safety,
she repeated to herself.
Your own safety.
Reaching the cart, she poured out the remaining potatoes and overturned the crate, fitting herself beneath it.

Huddled there, Sophia waited. Blanca's footsteps were
no longer audible. She peered anxiously through the cracks, trying to catch a glimpse of her old foe, but there was nothing to see beyond the red fog. She could not track the passing time. It seemed to her that over the course of many hours she heard the din of the station: running footsteps, screams and cries, the abrupt clatter of collapsing wood. At one point, in her silent corner, someone—a stranger—ran past toward one of the nearby train platforms. Sophia realized, watching his retreating back through the slats of the crate, that he was visible because the fog had begun to clear.

She could see things as far as twelve or even twenty feet away: terrible things. She saw people slumped on the floor. She saw a man holding a chair like a shield, trembling, his eyes closed tightly. One arm held the chair while the other hung at his side uselessly, bleeding onto his clothes and the ground. A red sediment covered every surface. Even the potatoes, strewn all around her, were dusted with crimson.

While one part of her watched the station, frantically observing the same few details over and over again, another part of her was wrestling with the visions that flashed through her mind: Blanca, the knight, and the dragon.
How is Blanca here?
Sophia asked herself silently.
How can she be here? How could she have survived in Nochtland? How would she know that we would be here—today, at this time?
The image of the scarred Lachrima lifting her veil appeared in her mind, the red mist swirling around her. Then the dragon appeared and turned its head, nostrils flaring, and great claws flexed open. A pair of great, strong wings with blue veins unfurled, and a long tail cut through the
air like a falling tower. Then the knight's sword shone brightly, catching some shaft of light that pierced the fog, and with a rattle of armor the sword swooped toward her.

Sophia began to realize, with slow perplexity, that she remembered more of them than she had seen. The thought made her uneasy and even more greatly confused.
Did I see more and not remember? Did I lose track of time? If I didn't see more, where do these visions come from? Am I imagining more than I saw?
She could not settle her mind—she could not even bring herself to see the frantic circle of her thoughts as something useless. Now that she had found relative safety in the potato crate, her thoughts seemed to run wild, beating about inside the crate like a trapped thing.

More time passed, and the station grew quiet. The fog slowly dispersed. The great statue of the veiled woman came into view, and she was now no longer white—she was red. But she was solid and immobile—a monument, not a person. Sophia realized she could see the entire station; the air had cleared completely. And her thoughts had started to clear as well. The desperate cycle of panicked images began to slow. It seemed fruitless to whirl through them again and again, seeing first the dragon, then the knight, then Blanca, and then the dragon once more. She began to wonder, in a confused and uncertain way, what she had actually seen.

Suddenly a thought burst onto her mind.
There are no dragons.
She seized upon it with relief and surprise. Using the thought as a handhold, she inched forward.
There could not have been a dragon in the station,
she thought to herself tentatively,
could there?
Then what did I see? Who was the knight holding Errol's sword? And Blanca . . . Could it be that, after seeing Blanca's statue, I imagined seeing Blanca herself?
As her mind stumbled through these questions, another suddenly occurred to her: What had happened to her friends?

With a flood of awareness, Sophia became conscious of how utterly confused she had been. While hiding in the potato crate she had not even wondered about them.

She was on the verge of throwing off the crate and going to look when she heard a sudden echoing sound in the silence. It was heavy clop of footsteps—more hoofbeats than footsteps, and very different from Blanca's light tread. Sophia looked through the slats, but could see nothing. The sound approached her from the side; she could not shift inside the crate, and so she waited, unmoving, for the creature to pass. Suddenly a great brown face appeared, inches from her own, and a great brown eye gazed at her through the slats. Sophia startled, shifting the crate. It was lifted into the air, exposing her. Sophia curled up, covering her head with her arms and bracing herself for a sudden blow.

None came. There was a brief silence. “We're not going to hurt you,” a voice said. “I'm sorry Nosh startled you. Only he knew where you were. I would never have found your hiding place.”

Sophia slowly lowered her arms and looked up. Standing above her was the boy she had seen in the antler's memories, and behind him, looking concerned and faintly apologetic,
was the creature himself: a great brown moose with heavy antlers. “Nosh,” Sophia whispered, “and Bittersweet.”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “You know my name.” He held out a hand as green as Goldenrod's. “We must leave. In a city of this size, there is sometimes looting after the fog has passed, and it can be just as bad as the fog.”

Sophia felt dazed. She knew that her mind had still not fully cleared, and she still did not trust her own thoughts. But she understood that the boy and the moose were offering to help her. “But my friends,” she said weakly.

“I know,” Bittersweet said, glancing over his shoulder, into the station. “We must leave without them. They are already gone.”

There was a sharp whistle, keen and high, from somewhere outside the building. Bittersweet grasped Sophia's hand. “That's the looters,” he said. “I'll explain more later, I promise. But we have to go.”

He cupped his hands by Nosh's round belly. “Step up on my hands,” he said. Sophia put her raider's boot onto Bittersweet's palms and heaved herself up onto Nosh's back. Bittersweet climbed up behind her. “Take us the safest way you can, Nosh,” he said, patting the moose's side, “and the sooner we get out of Salt Lick, the better.”

C
ASANOVA TRIED TO
stay awake. It was his third day on the road and his third night without sleep. The night before he had driven the wagon through the night, through an inch of fallen ash that made the ground white and eerily warm. Squinting down at the strange substance, he worried most about whether it would make them easier to track. That morning, in a farm north of Fort Pitt, he had left the surviving mule—exhausted from fear and overwork—in the hands of a farmer, and exchanged half the contents of the wagon for a draft horse. Fortunately, his northeasterly route had prevented him from
encountering any New Occident troops. He had chosen the less trafficked path to the state of New York, cutting across the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, on purpose. But for the same reason his journey proceeded slowly; the narrower road made for difficult travel. The draft horse was strong and needed less rest than he had feared. And yet, he knew they could not arrive soon enough.

Theo had woken on the previous afternoon, probably at the sound of Casanova's rifle when he was forced to shoot the injured mule. When he heard the boy's groan of protest, Casanova hurried to the rear of the wagon. Theo had not improved since then. He had a high fever. Sometimes he drank water, but most of the time he pushed it away, battling Casanova with his good arm as if fending off a poison draught.

Casanova urged and cajoled him, doing everything he could to bring him to consciousness. “Theo—hey, Theo,” he said desperately. “Wake up. Just for a few seconds.” There was no response. “Theo. Please. You have to drink water.” He felt a moment's panic when he could not feel the boy's pulse, and then he saw Theo's eyelids flutter. “I'll make it worth your while. You know what? If you just open your eyes and take this drink of water, I'll tell you the story of the scar. Don't you want to hear the story of the scar?” he pleaded. Theo's head lolled to the side.

Casanova took a long, shaky breath. When he inspected Theo's wound, he found it terrifyingly red and swollen. He knew then that, whether because of a substance on the arrowhead or simply because the injury could not heal properly with
the embedded pieces of flint, the wound had become infected.

After that, Casanova redoubled his efforts. As he continued on their route, driving through the evening and night, his weariness grew and he began to drift into that state of exhaustion in which doubts hover like specters and nothing seems certain. He wondered whether he should have sought a doctor in Fort Pitt. But, he argued with himself, the moment the wagon had fled the battle—no, the moment
he had driven on
, away from the battle—they had become deserters. He could not count on the goodwill of the commanding officers in Fort Pitt. Most likely they would enforce the law against sedition to the fullest extent, because he and Theo were convict-soldiers. Before the boy even had a chance to heal, he would find himself at the end of a hangman's rope.

So Casanova rode on, though he knew another day and a half on the road lay ahead.

The sun had not yet set, but on the narrow path through the woods, dusk had already fallen. Casanova let his chin drop, the reins slack in his hands. His eyes closed. Before he could drift into sleep, the sudden halting of the horse jolted him upright.

He blinked into the gathering darkness and saw, only twenty feet ahead on the path, a cluster of torchlights. They moved toward him. The men carrying them were at least six in number; they had long hair and heavy boots. If he had not been lulled by the sound of the horse's hooves and the creaking wagon, he surely would have heard the men, for every inch of their hair and clothes rang with silver. Raiders.

Casanova sat motionlessly, the reins now tight in his hands.
There was no place to go. The track was too narrow for him to turn around, and the woods on either side too thick. There was no opportunity for flight.
Then it will have to be bargaining,
he thought.

“Evening, gentlemen,” he said casually, as the raiders approached the wagon. He noted that two of the men wore goggles loosely around their necks, as if in readiness. Casanova waited.

One of the raiders with goggles came up to the side of the wagon and amicably slapped the horse's haunches. He gave Casanova a wide grin, and his metal teeth shone in the light of the torch he held. “Well, friend. What have we here?”

“I might ask the same. You boys are rather more east than you usually are, am I right?” Casanova asked.

The raider's grin widened farther. “That we are. War makes for good hunting.”

“Maybe in some places.”

Another raider, this one unsmiling, stared at Casanova. “Bloody Fates, man, you have one ugly face.”

Casanova looked back at him. In the long pause that followed, Casanova heard all the tinkling bells the raiders wore go silent as the men fell still. He waited, letting the firelight of the torches play over his scarred features, knowing well how it would look. Then he smiled wryly. “Seems to me the pot's calling the kettle black,” Casanova said.

There was a moment more of silence, and then the raiders burst into laughter. Casanova shook his head good-naturedly and took up the reins. “Well, my handsome friends, I know
what you're here for, and I know there's six of you and one of me. However, what you don't know,” he added, and the raiders' laughter died away, “is how much damage one of me can do. I make it a point of aiming for the face, just so you have a little something to remember me by. So I recommend you keep your good looks. Help yourself to anything you like, excepting enough food and water for the boy.”

The raiders gazed at him warily, and he could see that they were deciding whether to take offense. Casanova put up his hands in mock surrender. “You've got me. I won't say fair and square, but nonetheless. All I want is to get that sick boy in the back of the wagon to safety, and I need enough food and water for one day and a night. If you'll do that for me, I'll be much obliged. By way of thanks, I'll tell you what I know of the nearest troops, and I'll throw in a pair of goggles. Looks to me like you might need them.”

The raider who had first spoken stared at Casanova through narrowed eyes, and he turned to the man next to him. “Check the back of the wagon,” he said curtly.

The man ambled off with a sound like a purse full of coins falling down a set of stairs. Casanova waited. There was silence as the raider peered into the back of the wagon, and then the same metallic cacophony as he returned. “Yeah. Full of loot. Very sick kid,” he muttered. Then he said something to the leader that Casanova could not make out. It sounded like “lucky.”

“All right,” the first man replied gruffly. “Leave them food
for two days and clear out the rest.” He turned to Casanova. “That should tide you over.”

Casanova nodded. “I'm grateful to you.”

The raiders emptied the remaining contents of the wagon, taking all of the major's linens, wine, and costly preserves. Casanova watched with some regret as pickled vegetables, bags of fine flour, coffee and chocolate from the Indies, and jars of summer fruit jams vanished in the raiders' arms. He told their leader about where he had seen troops, and about what had happened to his own company under the leadership of Major Merret. The man listened in silence, and nodded gravely when Casanova described the archers who sprang from the side of the road. “Their masks covered their mouths,” Casanova commented, “not their eyes.”

“Did they, now?” the raider said, intrigued. “Might be they know more than we do. Haven't had the good fortune to see any red cloud myself,” the raider said dryly.

“A red cloud? Is that what the goggles are for?”

The raider gave a curt nod. “I take it you haven't seen it, either.”

“No.”

“Red clouds that turn the mind. Make your own flesh and blood appear as monsters, they say. Hard to know the truth of it, since I've only heard secondhand, but a man two days south told me he met a boy who speared his sister with a pickax. He thought she was a bear.”

Casanova scoffed. “Sounds improbable.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” The raider turned away, and Casanova heard him climb into the back of the wagon. After some silence, he got out and walked some distance into the woods, where his own horse was presumably tied up. He returned with a small cloth pouch, which he tossed up to Casanova. It was light, its contents like pieces of frayed rope under the cotton cloth.

“What's this?” Casanova asked.

“Dried beef,” the raider replied. He gave Casanova a keen look. “The boy needs food with iron in it.”

Casanova blinked in surprise. “Is that right?”

“He's Mark of Iron,” the raider said. “Won't survive without it.”

Casanova looked down at the pouch and back up at the raider, whose teeth, glinting in the flickering torchlight, seemed less forbidding now. “Thank you. Can I ask your name? To tell the boy who helped him, when he wakes.”

“You can tell Lucky Theo that Skinny Jim and the gang passed by. He'll remember me from old times.”

Wordless, astonished, Casanova watched Skinny Jim follow the other raiders back up the path. They led their heavily laden horses into the woods, and soon the light of their torches flickered out among the trees.

He sprang to his feet, his energy renewed. He tied the reins and hurried to the back of the wagon, where he found that the raiders had left them more than enough food. A lighted gas lamp was standing on a barrel of water. They had even left Theo's bedding, propping him up between the major's fine
cotton quilts. Casanova felt a spasm of relief. They had gotten off easy. He knelt down and reluctantly shook Theo awake.

“Theo—Theo, you have to wake up.”

Theo's eyes opened, and he looked up at Casanova uncomprehendingly.

“You're going to have some water and food,” Casanova said, putting his arm under Theo's head. Theo did not even react when Casanova accidentally brushed his injured shoulder—a bad sign. He gazed blankly ahead, and Casanova tipped the water canteen into his mouth. Theo choked, coughed, and then swallowed. Casanova gave him the smallest piece of dried beef he could find. “Chew that over, Theo,” he said quietly. “Skinny Jim says you need iron. So chew on that, and get better, would you?”

Theo chewed obediently and swallowed, but his eyes remained glazed over, and when Casanova lay him back against the bedding, he turned and closed his eyes without uttering a sound.