Outcast_Keepers of the Stone_Book One

by Andrew Anzur Clement

  “Really, Malka?” Liza questioned in a loud voice, standing opposite her. “What we need is to get as far away as possible, as fast as possible, before someone finds us in this area.”

  “I am a Thag. I know what I’m doing.”

  “Do you? From what I’ve seen so far you could use a few lessons in not being such an arrog….”

  Both Malka and Liza looked to the movement in the space between them as the parchment seemed to fall from thin air, moving slowly side to side as it did so. Liza grabbed it as it continued its descent.

  “Wh...where did that come from?” yelped the boy.

  Malka waved him off as Liza read the message. The felinoid frowned, smiled, and then hissed. Handing it to Malka, she turned away.

  As Malka viewed it, she noticed the embossed Ouroboros, which signified the emblem of the Society, accompanied by a short text:

  Three dark ones now follow.

  Head northeast.

  Quit fighting.

  - Arunesh

  Malka and Liza looked at each other in mutual annoyance.

  ***

  After covering their tracks, they continued for a few hours in silence. The terrain had not changed much, but Malka could tell from the angle of the sun that it would soon be time to stop and set up camp.

  At least we have shelter and horses, Malka told herself in an attempt to justify her recent actions. But, at what price? The question followed in her mind almost immediately: Did I really have to do what I did?

  Malka looked back at the youth she had captured. He sat on his horse, hunched over, and looking at the ground. His parents dead, she had very likely saved his life before capturing him, in a similar way Husain had done with her all those years ago. Yet, looking at him, she felt arise within her a great sense of what could only be described as a combination of angst and regret. She had never been accepted by the members of her Sect. What she had done made her a killer. Nothing more.

  No matter, she told herself. I have a responsibility to protect the object with which I have been entrusted. That thought brought a new wave of emotion, mostly outright resentment and guilt.

  The tan-skinned girl turned her attention to her situation, wondering why it was so important that they head northeast. Something occurred to her. The Thag raised her head toward Liza, who still remained in her human form and rode slightly ahead of Malka.

  “There is something I do not understand. If this Zitar and Arunesh know everything that is going on, then why can’t they just take charge of it themselves?”

  “First of all, they don’t know everything that is going on. Near as I can tell, they can make themselves aware of what’s happening in a certain place, or around a certain person if they first know to focus their attention there. Also, they can’t be everywhere at once. They live among us; for now, they have their own battles to fight. If we need them, they will assist as required. I’m surprised you didn’t figure out that last part. Zitar told me she already appeared to you.”

  “You mean the white-skinned woman who gave me the fake jewel?”

  “In the form she chose to appear to you, yes. That’s exactly who I mean. Now, does that satisfy your curiosity?” Liza’s voice made it clear that she meant the question rhetorically.

  “Wait a minute! What are you two talking about?” came the voice of their captive.

  “What do you mean?” sighed Malka.

  “I mean, ‘what are you talking about?’” he called from the rear position in the caravan of three. “People appearing and disappearing. Messages that pop out of thin air. You, sacrificing everything you had for some object or something. Some Fragment? A jewel? What jewel? What does any of this have to do with me? Both my parents are gone.” His voice faltered slightly. “Can’t you just let me go? Please? Promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  Malka stopped, whirling her horse about on him and pulling hard on the lead that tethered her steed to his.

  “You. Are. Not. Going. Anywhere. Am I understood? If you ever question what I am doing again, in the name of Shakti…,” Malka’s hand reached for her sash….

  Then she felt Liza’s hand restraining her. She sighed, looking down, suddenly deflated, at her horse’s neck. The felinoid moved her horse slowly past Malka’s, next to where the captive’s mount stood. The black-haired one addressed him in her usual casually trite manner.

  “Right. As I see it, you have two choices. You come with us. Or you die.” Liza let out a breath before continuing. “And look...um…,” she stopped again, as if realizing just now that she had forgotten something.

  “Wait. What was your name again?”

  “Henry,” the captive said in a quiet, almost plaintive tone.

  “Look, Henry. Malka – that’s the Indian girl back there who thinks you owe her a debt – isn’t exactly in a mood for your assessment of her life circumstances at the moment. Maybe you could just try being quiet. Oh, and no questions about things that don’t concern you, please.”

  “I-I wasn’t trying to ass…,” Henry began.

  “Very good, Henry,” Liza gave him a mock nod of camaraderie, then began to turn her mount back in the direction they had been traveling.

  At that moment, looking to his left, Henry saw that a town was evident just on the horizon. Both Liza and Malka, noticing where he had directed his attention, moved immediately, adjusting their trajectory so that they would be far out of eyeshot from any of its inhabitants. The horse of the captured youth followed, having been tied to Malka’s steed.

  “Hey! Um...Bishop’s that way! Can’t you take me there! Please?”

  “No,” Malka told him again. Liza moved her horse forward, near to Malka’s.

  “I agree that we can’t drop him off in the center of town,” she whispered. “But why can’t we just drop him right here and run for it? He’s starting to annoy me. We’ll get farther without him.”

  “No,” Malka said again. “I saved him. He stays.”

  Liza rolled her bright green eyes.

  “Okay, look. I realize that you haven’t spent a lot of time outside of that camp you grew up in. But you can’t expect everyone on the planet to behave in the way you’d expect them to.”

  Despite their hushed voices, Henry, apparently possessed of good hearing, overheard them. “She’s right! You can’t just demand that I stay with you because of some stupid Indian code of yours,” the brown-haired boy chimed in.

  Malka turned and glared at him.

  “No? Watch me.”

  Then she turned to Liza, her features squared.

  “And I’m tolerating you, aren’t I? Where did you get the idea that whatever I do is senseless? You don’t seem to have a good amount of better ideas yourself. Why do you think you can tell me what to do?”

  “Did it ever occur to you, even for a second, that I just might have a better sense of the situation than you do?”

  “Why would you? I never asked you to be here. You can have no idea what the stone I carry means to me. What I have sacrificed for it already. What is it about you that makes you think that you can pass judgment over what I do?”

  Liza turned backwards and fixed Malka with a delicious glare.

  “Do you really want to find out?”

  Malka stayed silent for a moment. Then let out a sound that was ambiguously between a sigh and a hiss.

  “Do you know something, Liza? I think I liked it better when you were a cat.”

  “What!?” Henry yelped, more in an expression of befuddlement than surprise, before he heard the felinoid’s response:

  “Well, I must say, that makes two of us.”

  ***

  Malka was awoken from her fitful sleep by a yowl. It was followed by the thud of something falling to the ground not far outside of her tent, and then a grunt. She could feel it; someone, or something, was watching the tent.

  The Thag sprang up and, sash in hand, readied herself for another encounter with the Urumi.

  “Malka! Malka get out here! Ugh...Goddam
nit! Malka!”

  She tensed. That was Liza’s voice.

  Last evening, they had passed the town Henry had called Bishop and – angling slightly more eastward – continued on for a few more hours before making camp. Malka, who had been glad to find a tent among the supplies she had appropriated, set it up. The tan-skinned girl had anchored the frame to the ground with rope, a hammer, and the wooden pins that were attached to each of its four corners. The three had started a fire, cooked some of the canned provisions, and eaten mostly in silence. Malka was still denigrating herself for the actions she had taken earlier that day, and worried about the news that not one but three Shadow Warriors now pursued them. Then Liza had stalked off, though still in her human form, presumably in search of a nearby tree in which she could sleep. Malka tied Henry, sitting with his hands behind his back, to the outside of one of the four vertical poles that made up the edges of the tent’s metal frame near where it met the ground. As she did so, she ignored his complaints about having to sleep while sitting propped upright and tied to a rigid support frame.

  With thoughts of the Urumi and the faces of those she had killed fresh in her mind, she crawled into the sleeping bag that she had placed inside the tent and forced herself to get some rest.

  Now, she launched herself out of the tent flap, turning from side to side in a blur of motion. The only thing she saw was Liza running towards her from a copse of leafless, light-brown trees about 100 paces away.

  “Where are they? How many?” Malka whispered as Liza neared her position, not wishing to announce her position to her adversaries.

  “It’s not the Urumi, you idiot!” Liza hissed and pointed to the right back corner of the tent, where the brown-skinned girl had anchored her captive the evening before. Malka turned her head in the direction Liza indicated. Her blue eyes went wide.

  “That boy you insisted on bringing with us!” Liza exclaimed. “He got away!”

  Fifteen

  “Monsieur Tarkowski.”

  Stas looked up from the mathematics notebook that he had been urgently searching through. The instructor had been going through the class, asking each of the students to provide the answers to simple binomial equations, giving each only a moment to respond. Stas couldn’t remember if the lessons he had attended on other continents had covered the necessary method. He had been looking to see if he had noted it down at some point in the past few months.

  “Yes, sir?” He spoke French, though he had been told upon arriving yesterday by the headmaster of St. Nicholas Catholic School in Fribourg that he possessed an oddly harsh accent.

  “Monsieur Tarkowski.” The math instructor’s francophone pronunciation of Stas’s surname carried a disproportionate emphasis on the ski. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry, sir. I was only checking to see if I could review the exercise you are asking me to perform.”

  “I see. However, that is for you to do on your own time. Here, you are expected to know the material and pay attention in class.”

  “Sir, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand how I could have known what exactly you were teaching today. Where I’ve studied before, we were allowed to check our notes….”

  The instructor cut the Egypt-born youth off in mid-sentence.

  “You are in Switzerland now, Monsieur Tarkowski. Please behave.” He then went back to quizzing the other students. He had been about to come to Stas again when the bell rang, indicating that the final lesson period of the day was over.

  Sighing in relief, Stas collected his things and headed for the door. The voyage to Marseille and then the journey overland had been uneventful – or as Stas thought, boring. Yet, since arriving at the train station in Fribourg less than a full day earlier, he had not had an easy time of things. First came his brief meeting with the headmaster. In addition to critiquing Stas’s accent, he proceeded to doubt the quality of the schools that the new arrival from India had attended. Clamping down on any negative reaction to the headmaster’s condescension, Stas responded only that he would do the best that he could.

  Then he had been shown to his room in the school’s dormitory. Upon seeing two beds, he had been surprised to learn from one of the monks that he would be expected to share the space. However, owing to a recent snowstorm in the Alps, his roommate would not likely arrive until the following afternoon.

  Leaving the main classroom building after his first day of lessons, Stas shivered briefly as he tightened his coat and attempted not to slip.

  Snow. The word wafted through his mind. It was not as if he had not expected to encounter it in the Alpine country. But, he discovered that he had been unprepared for his first impressions of how cold and unpleasant it could be. Previously, nights in the Egyptian desert had been the coldest temperatures Stas had experienced. This was a good many degrees colder, hovering just below freezing.

  The young Tarkowski briefly considered stopping to put on the hat and gloves that he had found packed in his luggage, presumably at the behest of his father. Then, he decided against doing so. It was only about a two-minute walk to the dormitory; wearing extra articles of heavy clothing was something he wasn’t accustomed to.

  Shaking off a dusting of snow that had fallen on his head in a brief shiver, he continued past the Gothic edifice of St. Nicholas Church, with its single large tower. Then, Stas turned onto a street lined with stone buildings a couple of stories tall. Walking down the cobblestone street’s slight incline, the Slav turned again through an archway and found himself in the courtyard where the dormitory was located.

  His first day of classes had not gone particularly smoothly, either. While Stas didn’t think his difficulties flowed from the quality of his previous education, as the headmaster had suggested, he quickly found that the organization of the curriculum was completely different. In some subjects, the kidnapping survivor suspected that – coming from the British system – he would have been much better versed than most of the other students, had it not been for his protracted absences over the past two years. In others he had found himself completely lost.

  The teachers, not used to receiving students from faraway colonies, had been far from understanding.

  Wanting to get out of the weather, Stas headed towards the main entrance. He crossed the threshold into the dark wooden foyer, stopping briefly at the front desk where all of the students were required to surrender their room keys before leaving. When Stas asked for his key, the man stationed there, who was dressed in the trappings of a monk, told him that it was not at the desk.

  It appeared that the complete stranger who would share his cramped room had arrived. This was yet another situation that was alien to Stas’s experience, putting aside the many nights he and Nell had camped in the jungle with Kali and Mea; they had all known each other.

  Stas ascended the creaking staircase at the far end of the entrance hall, climbing two levels above the ground to its highest floor. He turned right, then paused in front of a room labeled according to the same order and precision as all the rooms in the dormitory. The numbers 204 were clearly affixed to its dark, plain wood with wrought metal figures.

  The Slav tapped on the door lightly.

  “Ah...oui?” he heard from the other side.

  Stas entered to see a young man, about the same age as himself, seated on the bed opposite his. Possessed of closely cropped dark brown hair and light skin, the newer arrival, while not thick-boned, had an angular, slightly stocky build. He was dressed in an immaculate black suit, which struck Stas as slightly formal attire despite the colder climes. He rose to greet Stas, extending his right hand.

  “Jurgen Fischer, from Steckborn on Lake Constance.” He introduced himself as they shook hands.

  “Stanislaw Tarkowski. You can call me Stas.” They stood back from one another, each retreating to his own side of the room.

  “Stas,” his new roommate repeated, furrowing his brow for a second. Then he stated a fact. “That is not Swiss. Where are you from?”

 
; The new arrival to Switzerland hesitated. “Well, I was born in Egypt, in Port Said. But my father is Polish.”

  “Polish.” Jurgen seemed to think for a moment. “I see, one of the peoples from the east. Which country is he from?”

  Stas tried not to look insulted. Again? he thought. After his initial reception at St. Thomas’s, back in Madras, he was not eager to repeat the experience again. He wondered, not for the first time, if things would be any different in Fribourg.

  “He’s from Poland,” Stas responded. He knew exactly what Jurgen had meant by the question.

  “Right. But, the German part, the Austrian part, or the Russian part?”

  Stas sighed slightly. “My father escaped Siberia after being captured for fighting in the 1863 rebellion against Russia.”

  “D’accord,” Jurgen regarded the Slav.

  Not wanting to subject his nationality to further judgment, Stas tried changing the subject.

  “Lake Constance? That’s on the other side of Switzerland, isn’t it. You speak German there, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Well, our own dialect. But my family decided that it would be good for me to be fluent in both of Switzerland’s major languages. So they decided to send me here for the spring term.”

  As he explained, Stas now realized that he could detect a slightly halting cadence to Jurgen’s speech. He could discern no hint of resentment in the Swiss German’s voice about his family’s decision to send him to Fribourg. If anything, his roommate displayed pride in getting to know multiple languages as part of his national heritage.

  “What about you?”

  Again, Stas hesitated.

  “A couple of years ago, my father and I moved from Egypt to Madras. Then, he decided that it was too unstable for me. He decided to send me here, after I and, um, a friend got caught up in the local conflicts twice in as many years.”

  “Wait a minute…. I heard a rumor about two children that got taken as hostages by Sudanese rebels a couple of years ago and who not only escaped alive but survived for months, living among savages in the wild. I thought they were English, though.”