A Home in the Hills

by Robert J. Crane

  The rowers ceased so they might speak.

  Jasen listened intently as they talked. He could not understand any of their words, and they seemed to be different than both the Lady Vizolans’ native tongue and the language spoken by the Prenasians.

  The man grew grim. He spoke at length, shaking his head.

  “What’s he saying?” Longwell asked.

  “It was not a storm that did this,” said Huanatha darkly. “It was a man—with ghostly white skin and sunken eyes and a malevolent smile—a man trailed by glowing orbs, following him wherever he went.”

  Jasen’s stomach clenched, as his eyes took in the wreckage around them as if seeing it for the first time.

  Of course. The name bubbled from his lips, and he knew in his heart, in his guts, what—who—had happened here.

  “Baraghosa.”

  17

  “I don’t believe her,” Alixa muttered.

  She and Jasen were ashore. With every step, the clay beneath their feet crumbled a little more, dyeing the waters a reddish brown that overpowered the near-black of churned silt.

  The entire place smelled of sulfur. The smell pressed against Jasen’s throat, reminding him of the mountain that had split open, the terrible fumes that had suffused the burning ash cloud when it laid Terreas to waste.

  Three boats had come down from the Lady Vizola II, almost all hands throwing themselves into the rescue operation. One of those boats remained occupied, rowing carefully through the debris and fishing out bodies, then ferrying them to shore. Only once did someone come up spluttering. A fervor gripped the men then, fighting to bring the man in to shore, to men and women calling, providing their own help. But he was too scorched, and Jasen saw, as he was lifted out, Medleigh rushing to assist, he had only one arm. The other was just a stump, totally blackened.

  He lasted only a few minutes before death took him.

  Alixa could not stomach it. So she and Jasen, and Scourgey with them, retreated to where the survivors grouped in wailing clusters around the crumbled brick and warped metal and exploded wood beams that had once been the great buildings of this city. They tended to the wounded as they could, not understanding the language of the men and women who spoke to them, but understanding their gripping hands, their tear-streaked faces, the blisters on their cheeks and foreheads and the blood oozing down them.

  They couldn’t help. Not really. Not even a dozen Medleighs, two dozen, could turn around a fraction of these people’s injuries. There were just too many, the city’s ruin too vast. But Jasen and Alixa did what they could, scavenging fabric and tying it about wounds, helping people up and guiding them farther from the muddy, collapsing shoreline.

  “Why would Huanatha lie about Baraghosa having done this?” Jasen asked.

  They were escorting one of these people now, an old woman with arthritic hands and grey hair. She wasn’t even as tall as Alixa. Clearly in pain, she gripped the base of her spine as best as her twisted fingers would permit, wincing and whimpering with every hobbled step toward safety.

  “To further her own agenda?” Alixa suggested.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “To convince the rest of us to continue this mad chase.”

  “Mad chase?” Jasen echoed. “Do you not see what’s around us? Baraghosa has killed—again. This devastation … it’s his doing.”

  “If Huanatha is to be believed.”

  Jasen clenched his teeth. His frustration was very close to the top again.

  So was his exhaustion, though, and as he clambered up a stump of brickwork, guiding the old woman between them, he stumbled, canting forward.

  The old woman came down with him, shrieking—

  Jasen’s knees hit the edge of the brick. They stung, a line of searing pain.

  He rolled, old woman forgotten.

  “Oh—for goodness—” Alixa began. She darted for the old woman, grabbing for an arm.

  The woman waved her off. Practically howling, she crawled forward and away from the foreign children with pale skin, and the foul-smelling beast that loped alongside them, who’d pitched her into the dirt and a carpet of fragmented brick.

  Jasen lay on his back. Damn, his knees hurt. And his chest.

  Scourgey pressed her nose to him. She whined.

  “I’m fine,” he murmured, not sounding remotely convincing.

  Alixa loomed over him. “Can you get up?” Her irritation seemed to be giving over to concern.

  “Give me a second,” Jasen wheezed.

  This was getting worse. It had been bad enough in Luukessia, on their last fateful mission to Wayforth, coming in waves. He thought back, remembering how he’d believed, then, that he was tired or undernourished. The Aiger Cliffs were worse. Scaling the path up to the clifftops and the field of lightning rods … but he’d believed it just fatigue then, too.

  If Baraghosa had not told him the truth, that he was dying, would he be suspicious now? Would those white spots in his eyes give him greater cause for concern? Would these episodes of exhaustion have caused him to query Medleigh, instead of brushing his ailments off?

  Bizarre, to have taken the word of a man he hated, one who sought to levy destruction everywhere he went, at face value.

  And yet Jasen felt it in his heart, that in this one thing, at least, Baraghosa spoke true.

  Still, there were so many unknowns. And for a moment, he saw them all, a strange kind of tangle, many possibilities, all out of reach but each of them just as real as any other.

  He blinked it back.

  Scourgey lowered her nose to his skin again. Her nostrils opened wide, breathing in his scent, and she whined.

  What did he smell like to her, exactly? Did he have a rotten smell of his own, clinging to him like a mist? Was it sour, rancid, like meat turning in the hot sun, besieged by flies?

  He closed his eyes. Breathed. In, out. Just focus on that, he told himself. In and out again.

  He held his mother’s pendant in a loose grip.

  “Do you need Medleigh?” Alixa asked. Her voice seemed to come from very far. There was even more worry in it now, all traces of their arguments this morning—these past weeks—evaporated.

  He opened his eyes, shook his head.

  Alixa was blurred. Her anxious expression was visible to him, though.

  Jasen levered up, eyebrows knitting.

  White spots crowded his vision. They clustered in corners, where the world had gone darker than it had any right to be. But they danced all over too, like cataracts, floating on a pool of oil. And where they swept, he saw Nonthen—but not the Nonthen of today. This was a living city, unbroken. He saw grey stone buildings rising where now there was a sea of brackish water and debris. He saw red everywhere, banners of it, fabric hanging down from windows, fashioned into awnings to keep the bright sunlight at bay.

  And he saw people, caramel-skinned, in long robes, all of them moving, moving … Others were among them, people from different lands. Men and women and children with darker skin, Coricuanthians; lighter-skinned people filtered by too, from lands like Longwell’s Arkaria, standing out not just by color but by their dress, which was much more like Luukessian fare than the people of Nonthen wore.

  There were smells, too, and Jasen caught them in the back of his throat: the bright scent of seawater, the fleeting tastes of seared fish, not burnt, but crisped on a coal fires out at the docks.

  It flickered—and then there was the crater that Nonthen had become. But if he moved his head … if he followed the flow of the white spots in his eyes, it peeled away again, it was there, the city, a ghostly, ethereal overlay.

  He gasped.

  Alixa’s eyebrows drew close. “What is it?”

  “Do you see it?” he asked.

  She turned in the direction he stared. “The ruin?” Her frown deepened. “I see it.”

  Jasen shook his head. “The shining city,” he murmured.

  Scourgey pressed close to his shoulder. She whined, a baleful crooni
ng noise, unlike the fearful whimper she’d given out when faced with the rowboat ride from the Lady Vizola II.

  Alixa turned back to him. “Jasen? Is something …?”

  He heard little more than that. Her words, already coming from some distance, stretched, getting farther away from him. The white spots clouding his vision grew more frenzied, and suddenly there was a screaming pain in his head—actual screaming, a thousand voices rising in his ears, shrieking at horrors no mind should know. It threw the world’s colors out again, the overlay of the old city turning wickedly bright. Nonthen as it stood now, spread underneath, the brightness warring with darkness—and the darkness won, pitch black consuming all the light, and into it, Jasen fell.

  18

  It was dark when he woke again. For a few seconds he was unsure if he was still in the black place he had fallen. It was peaceful there, quiet, away from all the screams …

  Then a match was struck. A lamp was lit in the corner.

  Huanatha stood by it. She waved the match to put its flame out, then deposited it just inside the lamp.

  “Hello,” she said, her voice quiet.

  “I’m … on the ship?” Jasen asked. His voice was hoarse, tired.

  Huanatha nodded.

  She lowered her lithe body onto a stool. Elbows on her knees, she leaned forward, peering at Jasen with a peculiar expression made stranger still by the flickering candlelight, caressing one side of her face in its soft amber glow.

  Jasen moved to rise. But his body wouldn’t obey. His arms, still weak, struggled to straighten. And there was another weight upon him, across the bottom of his legs. Had he hurt himself worse in his fall? No, he couldn’t have, and it had been his knees, anyway, that he had struck, not the bottoms of his shins.

  He lifted his head to see that

  Scourgey lay upon him. She watched him, the same as Huanatha did, the candle’s gentle wavering reflected in her black eyes. Rarely did she appear to display any readable emotion at all, at least by those dark orbs. It was all in her body language, the way she moaned, or tensed, or crept close.

  Now, Jasen thought he could see sadness in her.

  “She can feel it, you know,” said Huanatha.

  Jasen’s eyebrows knitted. Now that his place in the world was concrete once more, he could feel the soft undulation of the boat. It was cool in here. The ship got warm during the day, its black wooden exterior baked by the sun, keeping the heat close. It bordered on uncomfortable, which was why Jasen stayed out of the confines of his quarters when he could.

  He felt just a hint of that latent heat in the room now.

  “It’s night?”

  Huanatha nodded.

  “Where is Alixa?”

  “In Nonthen still,” Huanatha answered, “helping how she can. Her heart cannot abide the suffering of others. She was not made to fight—but she learns. She will learn more. It is her destiny.”

  “Learn more? You mean how to fight?” Jasen’s throat felt raw, words coming out in a croak.

  “And other things.”

  “No.” Jasen shook his head. “Not Alixa.”

  “She did not have to fight Baraghosa before,” Huanatha said, “and she took up weapons then.”

  “She felt she had to.”

  Huanatha regarded him for a quiet moment. Finally, she said, “Perhaps,” and no more.

  Jasen eased himself up. His arms shook, trying to take his weight.

  “Do not rise,” said Huanatha. “It will do you good to rest.”

  “I need to help.”

  Huanatha chuckled, a very low laugh that made the hairs on the back of his neck rise in a way that was strangely sort of pleasant. “You are determined as always. But rest now. Your body needs it. Alixa, she is fine, assisting where she can … That is where she belongs, for this moment.”

  It was Jasen’s turn to laugh, although his came with no amusement at all. “Alixa belongs in the Emerald Fields. There is no other place in the world for her.”

  “Perhaps. At the very least, she has other places to go along the way.”

  Scourgey shuffled against Jasen’s legs, moving her forelegs, crossing one paw over the other. She lifted her head for only that, then settled it against Jasen’s shin. And still she watched him with the same singular focus that she had settled upon Longwell when first he was brought aboard the Lady Vizola.

  There was definitely sadness in her expression now, though; none of the bounding joy that had overtaken her at the sight of her former … companion, friend, whatever he was.

  Niamh, he reminded himself, for the umpteenth time.

  “Why are you here?” Jasen asked Huanatha.

  “Someone needed to be.” She licked her lips. “I believe we should discuss some things.”

  “Discuss what?”

  Her face creased with a ghost of a smile. Crow’s feet, just as faint, radiated a short distance from the corners of her eyes, thrown into relief by the candlelight flickering behind her.

  “What would you like to discuss?” she asked.

  Jasen frowned. Why did she insist upon speaking in riddles?

  He considered, for a moment, that it was all a dream, that he was still in the dark place after all, in that blessed quiet where the screams ceased.

  It was not a dream. Dreams did not feel so real, so mundane. He remembered the dream he’d had—how many nights ago now?—where he walked between his mother and father, in the grasses sprouting in the fields lying between Terreas and the wall the scourge were afraid to across. It had been over-bright, the details blurry and inconsistent.

  This, on the other hand, was his room, and his bed, on a ship that gently rose and fell with the tide. It was Scourgey’s real weight upon him; and it was Huanatha’s real face, her real eyes, fixed upon him in the twilight of the candlelit cabin.

  “Where do we pursue Baraghosa next?” he asked.

  Huanatha answered, “That, I do not know. For now, there are only mists.”

  At Jasen’s disappointed expression, she said, “Do not look so dejected, Jasen. We know he has been here. We know what he has wrought. And we will find him.”

  “And find none to take up arms with us,” he muttered.

  “Perhaps not,” said Huanatha. “More than likely not, in fact. We can still challenge him, though.”

  “How?” The image of Nonthen—the Nonthen that once had been, and the cratered rubble that it was now—came back to him. “If Baraghosa could do that, how will the three of us ever hope to fight him?”

  “We have righteousness on our side.”

  Jasen felt the strength leave him, and he sagged weakly upon the thin pillow. “Righteousness is not enough. Not for this fight.”

  Her expression faltered. For just a moment, her determination flagged.

  But she recovered herself. When she spoke again, her voice was low. “We will defeat him. And we will not be only three. This I can promise.”

  “Who else will join us?” Jasen asked. “Not Shipmaster Burund, or Kuura. And not Alixa. I said to you before, she will take up arms only if forced. Otherwise, she will never touch a weapon. She detests it.”

  “Why?”

  “It is … not proper,” said Jasen. “She was always so concerned with propriety in Terreas.” He recalled the way she took those pointless weaving lessons, the way she listened to her batty old Aunt Sidyera prattle on, shielded from all the world in a house she rarely left. She had hated those lessons immensely—but it was the proper thing for her to do, and so she’d spent many an afternoon in front of the loom, listening to the old woman drone on.

  “And yet she drew a dagger upon Baraghosa,” said Huanatha. “She will come around.”

  “She won’t.”

  Huanatha watched him. “You seem very sure.”

  “She will get no closer than she has. It’s too … ingrained in her, I suppose.”

  “Hmm.”

  “The woman who is responsible for our being here—Shilara Gressom; her name was Shilara
Gressom,” he added, because it was very important that it be known, “she was a soldier, once. She was capable, and experienced, and she saved our lives, and yet she was cast out of Terreas because women could not be warriors.” He shook his head, and for a moment, he hated the home he had known, or that part of it anyway.

  Huanatha bared her teeth. “The closed-minded—I would like to see what your people would have thought of me,” she bit off, looking as if she were ready to take the closed-minded villagers on right now.

  “Little good,” Jasen muttered. “But they are not here anymore … so you cannot ask them.”

  Huanatha’s lips pursed. The fight hadn’t gone out of her—Jasen didn’t truly believe it would ever leave her until she took her last breath—but she remembered where she was, and what they were talking about, that this was Jasen’s home, now wiped from existence, buried under a mound of slag and refocused her attention on him.

  “Alixa did not like Shilara,” Jasen said. “Not until the very end … and maybe not even then.” He tried to recall their last days together, but it was such a blur. The small moments, there had been plenty of them; how dull that trip had been, in hindsight, how few scourge they’d run into to cause their hearts to beat in a frenzy. The bigger moments, though, those were seared in Jasen’s mind forever: almost being lost in the river; the devastating eruption that had destroyed Terreas; the mad rush to the beach, the cart dragged by Scourgey after Milo died; and Shilara’s final stand, throwing herself to the scourge so that Jasen and Alixa could live for another day …

  “She looked in the mirror,” said Huanatha, “and did not like what she saw.”

  Jasen lifted an eyebrow.

  “You don’t believe me,” Huanatha said, nodding, “I see it in your face. But it is true. It is true of all of us, at one time or another. What we hate in others is often what we hate most about ourselves.”

  Jasen considered this. “I don’t think Alixa is much like Shilara.”

  “No? Well, you are the expert.” Huanatha grinned at him. Then, slowly, her grin faded.

  More softly, she said, “She will be fine, you know. When you are gone, I mean.”