New Cali

by Erik Schubach

  This brought a smile to her lips as she sighed in relief of her own. Hey, why is nobody scared of my smiting list? I've more kills than any living person, much to my shame. I drag that long chain of sin with me wherever I go.

  I made a mental note to bring this up at the next conclave and maybe send messengers with this staggering news to all the Mothers of the clans now... and to the Crown. I still have to remember that George has just as much responsibility over the Mountain Gypsies as me, just as I have responsibility over the Altii as well. It is a concept I am still getting used to. A lifetime of our societies being one way is ingrained in me and I have to unlearn.

  The more pressing concern is that some of the citizens of either culture are not adjusting well. Some of the People resent being governed by an Altii King, just as some of the Altii can't abide following who they see as an uncivilized Mountain Gypsy Queen. The absurdity of it is that the People are more civilized than those of us raised in the realms, not to mention that I was born and raised as an Altii, I hadn't even learned about my Mountain Gypsy Heritage until much later in my life, after my age of consent came and went.

  So I spend a lot of time educating both people's that we are not separate, not two separate sides, but one unified people, and that makes us stronger.

  We've relaxed many of the expectations and even punishments for conduct toward authority for the foreseeable future, until the culture shock of the new governance can become the norm. George says it could take a decade or more. When the first children being educated under the new system reach adulthood knowing only our new way of life.

  Verna has a poetic way of putting it which the heralds and minstrels would see as pure poetry, “Change is a bitch.” Ok, so maybe not poetic, but infinitely understandable and relatable. Then of course she'd follow it up with something profound like, “So pull up your big girl panties and suck it up.” I love the big muscular lady.

  I caught the cheese cube that hit my forehead in two possible futures, as my assailant chirped out, “Laney? Where did you go? I lost you for a moment, was it a vision, a seeing?”

  I smiled at her and ate the cheese as I shook my head. “No, just lost in thought.” She looked a little disappointed. She's endlessly fascinated with the premonitions I live through in my visions of the future. Only four of the touched of the people are cursed with... or blessed as Udele says, with the sight. Besides Udele and I there were two others who had the ability to varying degrees.

  As an Adept, my visions include all my senses. I can see, feel, smell, taste the future as it unfolds, often including me in the seeing. It is called transference, and while others find it fascinating, I find them mostly horrifying as they almost always involve pain or death or some future that I cannot allow to let pass.

  Emily has taken to documenting each one, and noting differences between the same vision I may have many times as the event approaches, getting clearer and more urgent the closer they get. She doesn't really need to document them, as a side effect of the magic of the mind that her people possess, she can recall everything she has ever seen, heard, read, or said. She documents them for future scholars and historians.

  I turned the tables on her as I looked her over. “Tell me about New Calians. Are they all compact like you? Do you keep your hair long like that by personal preference or is it a style from your old home? What is a typical day where you come from?”

  She tutted and said, “It is best to show and not tell. But no, I'm considered very short in New Cali as you are here, Great Mother.” Ooo, Great Mother, nice touch from the sarcastic blonde.

  Then she absently touched her braid and said as she stroked it, her eyes focused far away, “Knowledge Seekers have to blend into the new lands we find, so we don't have uniforms or any type of gear that identifies us to others from the Sect. So for every year of our missions, we grow our hair a hands length. The more missions and the more years the longer our hair, and we braid it in this ladder knot so that we don't mistake a woman with exceptionally long hair as one of our own.”

  I furrowed my brow. “Just women. What about the men?”

  “Only women can be be Seekers, as only a woman can possess the glow of magic of the mind.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. “There are no male magic users?”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “Not in New Cali. We don't understand why. There have been many theories but they never prove out. Such as women having different body chemistry, or only women are strong enough to wield it since only women are strong enough to have babies.”

  I snorted. “I like that last one.”

  She giggled and said, “Me too, though it's nonsense. The truth is we have no clue why only women can, and if they are born with the glow in their minds, they are brought before the Sect to become Knowledge Seekers.”

  This disturbed me for some reason. “Wait, you mean you had no choice in it? You were born that way so that meant your life was decided for you?”

  She nodded sadly and placed a hand on mine. “You of all people know how some of us do not choose our own paths in life.”

  I nodded, a small part of me feeling caged like she implied, but her unspoken words also resonated in me, that ours is a small sacrifice to do what is best for our people and the greater good.

  Changing the focus, I asked, “What is New Cali like, besides hot?”

  I could see her pulling up her memories of her home prior to making a home and family here in Sparo, and she spoke of the wonder in those memories. “Down as low as we are in the northern hemisphere, we are on the cusp of viability, it is theorized that even farther down near the equator, temperatures average between one hundred fifteen to one hundred twenty five degrees... unlivable.”

  “But New Cali sits in the shadow of the New Sierra Upheaval an imposing range created by one piece of the fractured continental shelf that wedged under another so that we only receive direct sunlight for four hours a day when it shines through the Eye, a fissure between two peaks.”

  She smiled wistfully. “There is a lake, the Cradle, the size of which is unmatched, except of course by the Great Sea in Solomon for which there is no equal, which is fed from underground water sources our people still have not been able to find due to the depth of the lake.”

  She was starting to take on her more scholarly teaching tone as the emotion took a side step to it. “Because of the Cradle's life sustaining waters, our ancestors survived and thrived. It is a wonder to behold. And there, at the Cradle's shore in the shadow of the Upheaval, is where we make our home, Doctrina, a settlement of partially preserved technology from the Before... not as much as Avalon, mind you.”

  I brightened and blurted in excitement, “The Latin word for learning.”

  She smiled at me with pride. I only knew that because I was fascinated when she had shared that the word carved into the Cedar Ridge Library, 'pvblic' was actually 'public' since it was from Roman and Latin alphabets not having a letter U but instead having a letter V with the same sound.

  I had researched a tome on beginning Latin that Em had recommended. I don't remember much, but can still recall some of the words and meanings from its pages. And doctrina was one of the few words I remember. There were so many languages lost to us in the Great Impact, but this one was dead even before then from what our Queen of the Scrolls informs me.

  Then Emily seemed to deflate, sadness overtaking her as she said, “We once had a repository of knowledge like the Penny Library for the first few centuries after the Impact. But the library of the ancient university that the settlement was built around, had burned to the ground in a great fire that destroyed half of the ancient ruins and part of the settlement proper.”

  It was like beholding pages in a tome of her people's history turning in her eyes as she continued. “AnaMaria Truthseeker, the first of the Sect of Knowledge Seekers, was also the first of us to shine with the magic of the mind. She had read two thirds of the tens of thousands of books before the fi
re. And she spent all the waking days of the rest of her life sitting with the Scribes, to try to resurrect the tomes she had in her head. But only a small portion of them had been reproduced before old age took her light from us.”

  She whispered as if she could see it happening in front of her eyes, “All of that knowledge was forever lost to us.”

  I placed a hand on hers, she looked so... beaten.

  Then she smiled. “But when our scouts found other lands that had life, the Sect was sent to observe these other peoples, to learn and assimilate their knowledge, and to seek out books... um tomes and scrolls that could be recorded by the Scribe Sect to restore the knowledge from the Before Times.”

  “These other lands were slowly dying, not having the protection of the Upheaval, and over the centuries we watched and documented first the Francisconians, then the Vegasites lights pass to time. But their culture and learnings live on through us.”

  She shook her head. “We searched for centuries but found no other pockets of life within our range, or found some that were long dead, with the ruins of their attempts at civilization the only monuments to their passing.”

  Then she brightened. “So imagine my ancestors' surprise and delight when thirteen people in colorful garb, came stumbling out of the desolate landscape of the uninhabitable lands to fall upon the shores of the Cradle.”

  “We did not speak their tongue, but some among them spoke an archaic form of English, one of our two tongues, Spanish being the other. So we quickly learned to communicate with each other and they told us of thriving lands of life, with thousands of people roaming beautiful snow and ice capped mountain ranges, of a sea that stretched farther than the eye could see, and endless forests.”

  She smirked. “They were called the Cristea of the People. And they were well educated, clever, and had intelligence burning bright within them. Half of them also possessed a form of magic we had never witnessed before.”

  “They told of of their months long journey and how most of their number perished in the crossing from this faraway land which was lorded over by Father Stone. So for over twenty years, supply outposts were placed every fifty miles to the north. It took so much time because most of the supplies were used by the very men and women sent out to slowly build up those same supplies at the outposts. Then one day, riders came back with word that the lands of Father Stone had been sighted on a horizon, over two months travel to the chilly north.”

  “We sent out Seekers to witness this new land's people, but it was found out that there were two peoples there now. Of course we expected the peoples of Father Stone and Sparo to crumble and fall to the ravages of time as well, but you thrived and survived, and great Realms rose from the wilderness.”

  She got that impish look I loved on her face as she scrunched her head to her shoulders. “One day, I was called upon as First Seeker, when my turn to make the crossing and gather knowledge from the people of Sparo came about. The last Seeker brought word of what we had sought for so long, they spoke of a great repository of knowledge in the realm of Wexbury, a Library of the Techromancy Scrolls that the rulers had amassed.”

  “So I went to do my calling, and in that frigid land, my heart warmed, and I found a people who so completely enamored me, and the Library was a dream. One day this young Techromancer, a year or two older than me, who had so much power restrained within him, that even people who held no spark could feel it, showed up in the Library.”

  “My heart skipped a beat when I first laid eyes upon him. So tall, so strong, with an unquenchable thirst for knowledge I've not see outside of the Seekers. He was in the library every day, consuming it all. I watched as he became a man of passion, of intelligence, and power. And I just had to be near him.”

  I was grinning like a loon, hearing the dreamy way she described Donovan.

  “So when he was declared Prime Techromancer, I stepped into the Library and just started organizing it and took over its care, all the while pushing out my magics with the suggestion that nobody ask questions and just accept that I was there.”

  I chuckled and pointed an accusing finger at her. “You stole the Library.”

  She winked and said, “I stole the Library, and decided not to return to New Cali.” Then she teased, “And the library is all the better for it.”

  A heavy sigh came from her. “Imagine my devastation when I learned that a Lady of the Court had caught Donny's eye just before then. I resigned myself to being content with my library and all the people I loved in Wexbury as he married. And I couldn't even be jealous, because Countess Shavey was such a beautiful person inside and out...”

  She pushed my shoulder. “Like your mother. And also like your mother, she championed the commoners, the serfs of not only the Keep but of all Wexbury. Everyone, including me, loved Countess Shavey.”

  She sighed in profound sorrow. “My heart broke every day for her and for Donovan when she got sick with Wasting Syndrome... then succumbed to the evil disease. Then over the years, I watched the broken man put himself back together again for his daughter, the Commander of the Mobile Battalion.”

  Now she was full of mischief. “And I fell all over again for that young man who studied in the library every day. Now I call him husband and my personal lout, and his daughter and her wife my daughters.”

  I pointed out, “You're not as cute as you think you are, mom. You were basically a common spy.”

  She huffed,. “Yes I am. And I take exception to being called a common spy, I was an exceptional spy.”

  I pointed backwards in warning toward the door where one my guards had snorted. Em pointed out, “If it weren't for your flummoxing amber magics, not even you would have questioned if I belonged in the court. Only one other ever realized I wasn't part of the royal court, and for some reason, he never called me out on it. Your grandfather, Sir Tannis, Hero of the Realm. It has to be something about how you Adepts can disassemble other magics to use as your own.”

  I sighed and offered, “Well you're a Countess of the court now, so it doesn't matter anymore. And Fred and Lucia didn't do anything about it when you revealed yourself, because we all love you, lady.” I scowled. “How did we get so far off track? Weren't we talking about New Cali?”

  She nodded, but before we could get back on track, a familiar page gleeped in the doorway when he found two blades at his throat. I looked at the poor messenger page, the same one who had operated the flash unit for Emily's announcement.

  I sighed heavily. “Jezelle? Really?”

  The leader of the Great Mother's Own sighed heavily right back at me. “He was running toward you, Great Mother.”

  My eyebrow cocked at her as I blurted, “That's his job! He's not going to kill me with those papers he is carrying.”

  She mumbled like a petulant child, “Well he could, I could.”

  Ok... I believed her. She, no doubt, could kill me with the papers, I don't know how, but I had no doubt in my mind. There was a reason she led the guards, first for Ranelle then me.

  I smirked to myself and told her, “And that's why I don't dare fire you.”

  Ok finally, I got the woman to grin. She sighed and told the page, “Boy, if you are needing to speak with the Great Mother, approach at a walk and inform me first, lest you wish to get a look at the color of your innards.”

  “Don't scare the poor boy! She didn't mean that.”

  “Yes I did.”

  The boy bowed deeply toward me. “If it's all the same to you, your highness, I think I will heed the lady's words as she scares me.”

  Jezelle beamed at that like it was the greatest compliment, the scamp.

  I looked at the poor page and motioned him forward as I asked, “I apologize, but I don't know your name.”

  He inclined his head, his page's cap almost falling off as he supplied, “Leo, highness. I was Duchess Lucia's personal Page until she assigned me to you, my Lady.”

  I grinned at him. “Ah, and you
tell her of all you relay to me.”

  He paled. I chuckled. “I'm sorry, I've been in politics for far too long now. I see all the machinations by default now. How I do hate politics and wish I could go back to my old chicken farm where everything was simpler.”

  Emily put a hand on the poor boy's shoulder. “Don't worry, Leo, you're not in trouble. In truth, we'd be a little worried if the rulers didn't try to glean some information for political advantage, as all the realms are clamoring for an edge in our little expedition.”

  He looked moments from sighing at her, the poor besotted boy.

  I prompted, “You can tell your Duchess that Laney told her to come herself if she wishes to gain any advantage. It isn't like we're skulking around in secret.”

  He looked nervous again and bowed slightly. “Lady.”

  “Please stop with the lady and highness and call me Laney, or Great Mother if you must. I hail from Wexbury too, and a lower station than you.”

  He nodded and looked both nervous and curious. I cocked my head and he leaned in to whisper, “Is it true you can destroy an entire army with lightning from your eyes?”

  Oh Mother Luna. I'll never hear the end of these rumors now that the truth of me is out, and the tales from the Monolith and Solomon are greatly exaggerated. “It wasn't lightning, and it didn't come from my eyes. Don't believe everything you hear, especially from the Gypsy storytellers. They embellish.”

  I sighed and palmed a small throwing dagger, then spun and flung it toward the rafters when I felt someone's amusement. Ranelle snatched the blade from the air and started paring an apple in her hand to eat the slices. She asked as she took a bite, “How did you know I was here?”

  Pointing at her accusingly I said, “I've known you were up there the whole time, I'm getting really good at tasting your magik even when you suppress it. And your emotions bleed into it, I felt it... laughing.” This got a cocked eyebrow from her. Good, she can just stew on that a bit and wonder how long I've been able to do that when she is skulking about and eavesdropping on everyone.