Reluctantly, I took the first few steps down the path, keeping one hand on the wall to my right. The snow continued to fall, and footing was slippery. More than once I sent a shower of rocks tumbling down the sheer slope below, and soon my nerves were as raw as my windburned cheeks. The mule snorted and champed its bit as it picked its way behind us. We scattered a herd of bighorn sheep, the lambs bleating as they scrambled nimbly after their mothers.
The wind died down the lower we headed into the canyon, and the air warmed slightly. I had never envied folk living down the cliff walls during the summertime, missing out on the fresh breezes up on the rim, but during the winter, it was far more protected and pleasant. Still, I was only dressed in my nightgown and traveling cloak, and soon my feet and hands were chapped and numb.
“How much farther?” I asked over my shoulder.
“Just over this rise,” she said automatically.
I stopped and turned around, my fists on my hips.
“What?” she asked.
“That’s exactly what you used to say when we were coming back from in the field,” I said.
“So it is,” she said.
Blowing out a breath of frustration that hid the twinge of nostalgia in the pit of my stomach, I turned back around and stormed on ahead.
It wasn’t over the next rise, of course. It never was. It was a full hour before the little track joined a bigger one, still hugging tight to the canyon wall but wide enough that two mules could walk abreast.
“Up,” my mother said, pointing to the switchback that led back toward the top of the canyon.
I was surprised to find that we were back in the settlement below Stairs-to-the-Stars, though the palace was well out of sight high up on the rim. Folk throughout the canyon built their homes in the natural overhangs that cut into the walls, splitting Callais into neighborhoods known as hobs. Some of these hobs were sprawling, complete with gentle grassy areas and stands of trees; others were squeezed into crevices so tight the houses looked more like swallow colonies all stacked on top of each other. At this hour and in these conditions, only the earliest risers were up, yawning as they slogged through the snow to teetering communal woodpiles. While they didn’t seem interested in us, I pulled my hood farther over my head all the same, covering my ornate star band.
The snow was just beginning to ease up when my mother called tiredly, “Whiptail Hob.”
I looked up at the side road switchbacking up the canyon wall. Gathering my last shreds of energy, I started up the climb, my thighs burning. We passed through a stand of junipers clinging stubbornly to the rocks and a little stony creek that chattered down the cliffside. Finally, puffing and panting, we reached the shelter of the overhang. Whiptail was one of the smaller hobs, but not as densely packed as some, home to perhaps three dozen individual houses. There was a common space in the middle, home to a little copse of aspen trees, their black-and-white mottled trunks stark against the snow. A few goats wandered the common, nibbling frozen twigs.
My mother’s house was at the very edge, where the angle of the rock floor became too sharp to build any farther. While it meant her roof tapered almost entirely to the ground at the far side of the house, it also gave her the rest of the sloped shelf all to herself. Four squat beehives sat past her door, flanked with straw for winter insulation. She wasn’t the first inhabitant; faint petroglyphs scratched into the stone ceiling told of the families who had lived in this house for generations—images depicting occupations, hardship, joyful events, and many, many women having babies.
My mother led Checkerspot into a hay-filled awning. A fluffed-up sage grouse fussed at her from its roost in the loft. My mother responded by poking underneath it and coming up with a single speckled egg.
“Breakfast,” she said, beckoning me to the little door in her lopsided house.
I ducked through the opening, knocking a braid of wild onions hanging next to the lintel. One dropped to the floor, and my mother scooped it up and set it on the scrubbed wooden table with the egg. She unhooked her cloak and tossed it over the back of a chair. I could see why she had kept her long sleeve over her left hand in her disguise as the clerk—her prison tattoo peeked out from the hem, the ink muddy. M for Mesa, followed by a line of little crosses to mark the years of her sentence.
“Smaller than our twirly house, of course,” she said, filling a tin pot with water from the dipping barrel. “And no willow brush creek, but the view’s not bad—oh, great Light, are you crying?”
My palms jumped to my face, my breath slipping between my fingers. Moon and stars, just that smell—that musty scent of preservative from the insect vials, the hint of dried sage bundled in the rafters, a touch of beeswax, all underlined by the smell of adobe and woodsmoke . . . the tears had sprung almost instantaneously. They’d blurred my first glimpse of the room, but as they fell I took it all in—the narrow shelves scooped out of the adobe walls, holding crates of collection vials, wooden specimen cases, and spreading boards. Sketchbooks were stuffed in every gap; a few loose illustrations were tacked to the walls, ruffling quietly in the breeze from the open door. My breath cracked again, my tears slipping between my palms and my cheeks. I heard the tap of the pot being set down on the table.
You have no right to cry, Shaula had said.
“I’m sorry,” I said thickly.
“Oh, please, Gemma, crying used to be like sweating for you. It came as easily as your laugh. There’s no reason to be sorry.” My mother put her hands on my elbows and guided me into a chair by the table. “Sit down. Here.”
She pressed a handkerchief into my hands, and I blotted my face with it. When she was sure I had a handle on myself, she picked up the pot again and hooked it over the hearth, stirring up a few coals until they caught the bundle of tinder. Dusting her hands off, she took down a rickety little field stove.
“So,” she said. “Let’s start with first things first.”
“First things first,” I repeated numbly. I wiped my nose. Then I straightened and said a little louder, “First thing is . . . what on earth are you doing here?”
“Oh, I was more interested in how you take your egg.”
“How long have you been in Callais?” I asked.
She checked the edge on a knife and started slicing the little onion into coin-thin pieces. “Four years now, I suppose.”
“By yourself?”
“Well.” She waved vaguely to the cases and vials of dead insects. “Depends on what you mean. But no, not entirely. I have my research team.”
“What research team?” I asked. “I read all the natural science pamphlets that come out. Your name isn’t ever in any of them.”
“No, of course not. I don’t release my work to the crown. Hand me that skillet, will you?”
My mouth dropped open. “You don’t release your work to the crown? That’s . . .” Unheard of. “That’s treasonous.”
“Yes, we always were alike, you and I.”
“We’re not alike.”
She wiped the last of the onion from her knife. “You even use my hatching technique in your illustrations.”
“We’re not alike.”
“The skillet, Gemma.”
I reached up for the dented little thing and yanked it off its peg. She took it and set it on the stove. I watched in frustrated silence.
“Some people,” she said, rummaging in a battered old field pack, “would have said ‘thank you’ by now. I’m no filly, to be breaking into guarded prisons.”
“How did you get in?”
“Ladder.”
“Just like that?”
“The guards had a blind spot on the canyon side,” she said, removing a metal tin from her pack. “They detailed it to me quite nicely.”
“And the grenade?”
“One of the Cypri’s.”
“Lyle Roubideaux?” I asked.
“Yes, him. His work made it to Callais a few weeks ago.” She opened the metal tin and poked around inside. “Every eng
ineer and chemist in the place has been pressed into developing the weaponry detailed in the report. The chemical bombs—the ones that burn on water, the ones that light damp wood like hay in a drought, and the ones that cause temporary blindness—Alcoro has control of them now. Isn’t that a comforting thought?”
Her tone suggested my same reaction—the prospect of being armed with such unprecedented weapons was terrifying. I shook my head. “How did you come by them for your own use? Did you break into the labs like you did the Retreat?”
“No. One of the chemical engineers is part of my old group of rabble, though she keeps it secret to maintain her position. She smuggled me a few devices to use, and she’s the one laying the false trail to Port Juaro—at significant risk to herself, I might add.”
I clenched my fists on her handkerchief. Several beats of silence passed as she selected a paper-wrapped object from the tin. Finally I blew out a breath. “Thank you.”
She snapped the tin shut. “Was that so hard?”
“A little,” I said hotly. “It may come as a surprise to you, but you popping up for the first time in sixteen years wouldn’t have been my first choice for rescue. You threw me away as a child for your own political agenda. You conspired against Alcoro. You almost ruined my own future.” Or at least, she’d tried, before I completed the task for her.
She pulled out a pair of pliers and stuck the little paper-wrapped object in the head. “Good thing my sister picked you up, so she could do it instead.”
My fists trembled and clenched on the handkerchief. I could conjure no love for Shaula, but I surged with the irrational need to defend her anyway. “At least she took me in. At least she cared for me, sent me to lessons, gave me a bed—what is that?”
With a crunch and flare of sulfurous smoke, my mother had clamped down on the paper object in her pliers, and it had burst into flame. She held it to the rim of her field stove, lighting the burner. “Fire capsule.” With the stove lit, she held the flame in front of her, studying it appreciatively. “Coxa—my friend in the labs—came up with them. Highly useful in the field—no need to shower everything in sparks, or carry a tinderbox.”
I blinked at the bright spot of flame. “What’s the mechanism?”
“Glass beads of sulfuric acid and potassium chlorate. When they’re crushed, the chemicals mix and ignite the paper.”
I pushed my chair back and picked up the metal tin. I plucked one capsule out and examined it. “No flint or steel at all?”
“Nope.”
“Incredible.”
“I know.”
“Do they store?”
“For a few weeks.”
“How long do they burn?”
The flame at the end of her pliers puffed out, leaving only the trace of sulfur smoke. I looked up and was startled to find our faces less than a foot apart. I stood back from the table, still pinching the capsule in my fingers. She slowly set down the pliers.
A beat of silence flickered past.
“You left me,” I said, a little quieter. “You said, stay right here, and then you left.”
She sighed and tapped the ashes left on the pliers into the hearth. “I didn’t mean to, Gemma. I didn’t expect them to arrest me. They’d let my friends go, and I hadn’t done any more than they had. If I had known, I never would have left you at the twirly house. You do remember the twirly house, don’t you?”
I flushed. I was still having trouble keeping the memories at bay in this tiny kitchen. “Of course I do.”
“How we built it together, mixing up the clay and straw from the river, and how we molded funny faces into the walls?”
I remembered the days of squishing the cob together and building up the walls, watching our house grow bit by bit. I remembered collecting baskets full of smooth river stones and embedding them in meandering swirls. There wasn’t a straight line in the place—it was all curves and rounded corners. My mother built it that way on purpose.
“Nothing in nature is straight except the horizon,” she had said as we molded the arch over the front door. “No boxes, no lines.” We had named the resulting lopsided, wandering structure our twirly house.
I had loved it with a fierce, deep-set devotion.
“I remember molding the horned beetle by the back door,” I said.
She laughed—a sound that unexpectedly brought back a wash of other memories. I abruptly looked away, gripping the handkerchief.
“We were happy together, Gemma,” she said, still smiling. “We had a garden. We grew beans and acorn squash. We had an avocado tree, and a goat named Boots. I wrote articles for the Journal of Sciences and illustrated texts for other biologists. You used to help me ink the colors.”
“That’s not all you did,” I said stoically. I had forgotten about Boots.
“No,” she said almost thoughtfully. “It’s not all I did.”
“You were meeting in secret, you were collaborating with dissenters. I remember people coming to our house at night—I used to sit around the corner of the hall when you thought I was in bed.”
“No, I knew you were listening,” she said. “What did you hear?”
I took a breath. “I didn’t understand all of it. But you didn’t agree with the Prophecy. You thought it was harming Alcoro.”
“Not quite true,” she said. “What does the Prophecy say?”
“We are Creatures of the Light . . .”
“No,” she interrupted me. “What does it say—not what do we say it says. You’ve spent your adult life in Callais, and most of that in the palace. I’m sure once you were crowned they started engraving the Prophecy into your star bands lest you somehow forget it. But I know, amid all that, you’ve seen the actual petroglyphs themselves.”
She opened a field journal and tore out a piece of paper. She uncorked a traveling bottle of ink and dipped a quill, carefully blocking out several lines of text on the paper.
When she was finished, she turned the paper around. She had indeed copied the old petroglyphs verbatim, complete with all the breaks and patches where the glyphs had worn away over time.
We are creatures o . . . he Light,
and we know it i . . . perfect.
. . . the seventh king of the canyons . . . ill rise to bring
the wealth and prosperity of a thousand years.
peace shall come fro . . . wealth . . .
I am a prism, made to scatter light.
S . . .
Underneath were the two familiar images: the human figure, with the head partially faded, and the six-pointed star.
“What does the Prophecy say?” she asked. “In short, we have no idea. I’m one of those dissenters who believe we can’t fully know what it originally said based on the fragments that are there.”
“But there are experts,” I said. “People who have studied the Prophecy for centuries, who’ve written and debated and theorized on what it means.”
“Yes, like my darling sister,” she said, popping the cork back on the ink bottle with a smack of her palm. “Let me tell you about people like her, and the ones who came before her—things are never as simplistic as the Prelates make them out to be. The Prophecy doesn’t exist in a void. It has been intimately tied to the economy and policy of this country since it was first transcribed from the rock.”
“You think I’m not aware of that?” I said as she returned her attention to the field stove. “I am—was—the queen of this country. I am intensely aware of the effect of the Prophecy on our economy and policy. It dictated every decision we made in the council room.”
“It’s not a one-way street,” she said, drizzling oil into the skillet. “It goes the other way, too. Decisions made about the Prophecy are always influenced by secular motives. Why do you think Lumen Lake became the target of the Prophecy?”
“Because it was revealed to the Prelate.”
She rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “Yes, by fasting and imbibing hallucinogenic tinctures—forgive my recurring heresy, but
I’ve had hunger visions before, and I wouldn’t base my political strategy on them. But perhaps I’m too cynical, and the Light really did whisper the name of Lumen Lake in the Prelate’s ear. You can’t really think that was their only motive, can you? You don’t suppose it had anything to do with the death of an aging monarchy and the ascension of a child queen to the throne? You don’t suppose it had anything to do with the wealthiest nation in the East suddenly under unstable control? The plan to take Lumen Lake first started circulating when Queen Myrna Alastaire died and her eleven-year-old daughter Mona was crowned in her place. You don’t suppose that influenced the Prelate’s stratagem at all?”
“That’s . . .”
“Treasonous, yes, I know—you must stop being surprised. Why do you think I was locked away in the Mesa prison? Alcoro is rooted in the Prophecy. We’ve thrown so much money and effort to ensure its fulfillment that any whisper we might be following the wrong agenda is enough to strike terror into a Prelate’s heart.” She shook her head. “But those whispers exist for a reason, Gemma. And that’s the main reason I needed to get you out of the Retreat. There’s something you need to know.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s another Prophecy.”
The words sounded alien, like they shouldn’t exist in the common Eastern tongue. I tested them myself. “Another Prophecy? You’ve found one?”
She cocked her head, the grouse egg poised over the rim of the skillet. “You don’t sound astonished beyond belief.”
I swallowed. “I’ve heard there might be more. I mean, you dissenters are always claiming there are other fragments, bits here and there that disprove the one in Callais. I’ve done a lot of reading on the claims folk have made. Most of them are questionable at best.”
My mother snapped the egg against the skillet and poured it over the sizzling onions. “There have always been claims, and probably a few of them have been true. But this one is definitely real.”
“Where is it?”
“It’s . . . well, first, you have to understand my current work.” She pointed to the little door in the far wall—one I had assumed led to a bedroom. “Take a look in there while I finish breakfast. Try not to let in too much light—it disturbs them.”
Creatures of Light, Book 3 Page 3
