Writers of the Future, Volume 29

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Harvester for sure,” Rey said, after Mara had wrestled the body onto its back. “Still got the scythe. Mean-looking bastard, ain’t he?”

  Mara nodded, but the man’s face swam in and out of her vision in a blur. There was his heavy brow, a hole through the middle of it; there were his ruined teeth, exposed by a slack eerie grin–

  But there, too, was something else, someone else. Some other face she almost recognized.

  She blinked twice and her vision cleared. The dead man came into solid focus. She brought a hand up and pressed hard over her eyelids. Not now, it couldn’t be going now. Not when it seemed as if she finally had a chance.

  “Come on, help me get this ugly lug off the road.”

  Mara grabbed the man’s feet and Rey took him by the shoulders. They didn’t have to carry him far, since he was practically off the road anyway. They took the body into the trees and down a little slope to a place where the tall brush would hide it. They laid him at the base of the slope without ceremony.

  Mara stepped back to study him, the way he lay in the brush. Before she could think better of it, she stooped down to the body and turned it roughly, holding its shoulder off the ground with one hand while she fumbled with the straps on its back. The dead man’s arm felt like clay under her hands, cooling and softly pliant. After a moment’s work, she had the scythe free, and she let the man drop back to the ground.

  “What the hell do you want that for?” Rey said. He stood back from her as she swung the scythe up to rest against her shoulder.

  “Don’t know,” she said, running her fingers down its haft. “Just working something out. The last pair didn’t have them when they died, right?”

  It felt solid enough, and heavy. Not a well-balanced thing, with all its weight in the blade.

  Rey stared at her. “That’s damn creepy.”

  “Yeah,” Mara said, and shrugged, and then turned and walked back to the road. Rey followed her after a moment.

  When she was almost there, she stopped.

  The harvester’s horse hadn’t gone far. They found it by the roadside, facing away from them. Its white-gray tail swishing.

  A sick feeling rose in Mara’s gut.

  “That horse,” Rey said. His voice was strained, rough.

  Mara held up her hand, telling Rey to stay where he was. She put the scythe on the ground and crept forward, going slow and careful to avoid startling the horse. She talked nonsense to it under her breath, so it would hear her voice and know she was there. “Hey there,” she whispered. “It’s okay; it’s all right. Everything is going to be fine.”

  She took up the broken tangle of its reins, threading her hand down familiar leather. The horse stood its ground, skin shuddering, eyes white-rimmed with panic.

  “It’s fine,” she said again, but something hot welled in her eyes. “You’re all right.” Her throat closed up on the words. She couldn’t say more. Instead, she touched the softness of the gray horse’s nose and stood petting it, her head bowed, blinking fast.

  “Mara,” Rey said. He hadn’t come any closer. “It’s the same horse, isn’t it.”

  Mara tried to respond, but her mouth was dry. She said nothing.

  “Isn’t it?”

  She nodded, jerkily.

  “Oh, damn,” Rey whispered. He’d gone sandstone-pale. Stood there with his hands out like he was looking for something to steady him, but could find nothing.

  Mara turned the horse away from the tree. Behind its saddle, it carried Keera’s pack, hooked to the flaps.

  A cold pit opened up in Mara’s gut. That was it, then. No chance that she’d just traded the horse away or anything like that. Everything she’d had was in that pack, everything but her gun.

  “What does it mean?” Rey said, his voice shaky. “Did that bastard—did he kill her?”

  “I don’t know. Could be he just stole the horse. Could be she’s fine.”

  She twined her hand in the horse’s mane. Maybe that could be, but she didn’t think so.

  She should never have let Keera go. It should have been her responsibility. And now look at it, her baby sister dead. Killed away from home where they couldn’t even bury her. It wasn’t right.

  “Yeah, that could be,” Rey said. He didn’t sound like he believed it, either.

  They stood there by the side of the road in quiet, Mara scratching the crest of the horse’s neck and thinking about her sister being dead. Then Rey folded up as if someone had punched him in the gut and dropped to sit on his heels. “I don’t know what to do, Mara.”

  She said nothing.

  “It’d be easier if I’d seen her,” he said. “But now I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if we’ve killed the man that killed her, or if she’s even dead at all.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “What are we gonna do?”

  She considered. Then she walked forward, pulling the horse along by the reins. It didn’t want to move. “We’ll go home,” she said. “Keera would hate us if we fell apart now. The town still needs protecting.”

  Rey nodded, very small. Mara bent and offered her hand; he took it, and she helped him to his feet. His eyes were glassy with unshed tears.

  Mara didn’t feel like crying at all, anymore. She just felt that cold pit yawning inside her, as if something dead had its hand stuck through her stomach to grip at her heart.

  “Come on,” she said.

  She picked up the harvester’s scythe again, from where it lay in the weeds. Rey said nothing. They walked the long road back together and no one spoke.

  Mara woke the next morning twisted up in her bed, the blankets twined through her arms, panting and damp with sweat. She couldn’t remember what she’d dreamed. But it had been something bad, and something loud, and echoes of it still rang through her head even in the stark pale light of morning.

  “What did I do?” she said aloud. “What have I done?”

  She got up and wiped her face clean and made herself some chicory. She drank it standing by the window, looking out at the Lady’s house, barely visible on its distant hill. High up, set away. Where she could look down on everyone.

  The chicory burned her throat and settled her nerves. When it was done, she left the window and went to the place in the corner where she’d propped the harvester’s scythe, covered in sackcloth. It seemed smaller than it had been the day before.

  With a hand that still didn’t shake, she twitched the cloth away. Keera’s rifle leaned against the wall where last night Mara had left the long-bladed scythe of a harvester.

  “Damn it,” she said, very softly.

  If only she’d felt surprised, though. That would have made it better. But no part of her was shocked. There was only the creep of horror up her spine, a cold twist in her gut. And the slow burn of shame. Because hadn’t some part of her known it already? Hadn’t some part of her seen it, out on the river road?

  She set her back to the wall beside her sister’s gun and slid down until she sat in a heap on the floor. She pressed her forehead against her knees and closed her eyes. She stayed like that for a long time.

  Rey didn’t need to know yet, not until she’d figured it all out. He was mourning enough. She took the gray horse and rode out as soon as the sun came up. The horse jigged underneath her, spooked at phantoms. She spoke quiet words to him but he wouldn’t calm.

  The sun crept higher as she rode, already a white glow in a pale sky. The last dying gasp of summer. The day would be mercilessly hot.

  The trip to the river road felt long, though she urged the horse to a trot. But she finally tur
ned onto the road and went to the place where they’d left the dead harvester. She swung down from the horse and left it tied to a tree while she made her way down the slope. Her boots skidded on loose dirt. For a moment, she couldn’t remember exactly the spot where they’d left the body and she circled round, riffling through bushes and weeds, but then she saw a flash of bright color on the ground. The color of one of Keera’s shirts.

  She brushed the leaves out of her sister’s face with the flat of her hand, straightened the fall of her hair over her shoulders.

  But Keera would never pass for sleeping.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mara whispered.

  And there, alone, she let herself cry.

  After a while, she dried her eyes on the back of her hand, went back to the horse, and got the coat she’d worn that morning. She took the coat back to Keera’s body and snugged it up over her shoulders.

  “I’m going to make things right,” Mara said, voice hoarse. “And then I’ll come back for you.”

  But of course, Keera couldn’t answer.

  Mara lingered a while longer, and then went back up to the road. She untied the horse and swept into the saddle. If she needed answers, she had a good idea of where to look.

  Don’t go,” the finch warned, but Mara went on up the hill to the Lady’s house. The clockwork finch fluttered around her head, its movements quick and uncertain.

  “You knew, didn’t you?” she said, never stopping her mad charge up the path. “And you did nothing.”

  “I am her creature. What do you expect me to do?” The finch swooped and dove and the clanking sounds in its belly were louder than ever. “I tried to make you see.”

  “I see fine!”

  At the crest of the hill, Mara left the finch behind and burst through the Lady’s front door. Dead things crunched under her feet, rodent bones and bug wings. The clockwork birds shrieked on the rafters, all together, a mad chorus. She rounded the corner and hit the Lady’s door with her arms outstretched. It flew open and Mara half-fell into the room, stumbling and skidding over the floor. The Lady whirled from the window, her head high. Mara stopped and stood, fists clenched so her nails bit into her palms. “My sister is dead.”

  The Lady moved to her armchair and sat. She folded her hands in her lap. “I know. I am sorry.”

  “I don’t give a damn. Somehow, you did this.” Mara stalked the floor, gripped by a teeth-grinding feeling that wouldn’t let her rest. She had to keep moving, or it would all spill out.

  “It wasn’t me that killed her,” the Lady said softly.

  And didn’t that cut as sharp as a harvester’s scythe.

  “You changed her,” Mara said.

  The Lady moved her hands in her lap, stretching her thin fingers. They were different than before, slimmer and less wrinkled. The rings hung loosely on them. “Why are you so quick to blame me?”

  “Because only you could do it.” She swept around the back of the Lady’s chair, passing by the green tapestry with the eagle gripping a man in its claws. “Because you’ve got to be doing something up here other than watching the road and fixing my eyes. You’ve got to be getting something out of it.”

  “Yes,” the Lady said. “That’s true. I protect my town, and in return, I am fed. Each of you will feed me, in time.”

  Mara stopped dead. “What do you mean?”

  “It is as I say.” The Lady stretched out her long bare neck, turning it as if to work the kinks out. “Don’t you see it every time you look at me? I am a creature that feeds on death, girl. When someone dies here, their spirit feeds me. Makes me stronger. I was weak when you killed those two on the road. Now I am strong again.”

  “No.”

  The Lady had always helped her, been nothing but generous to her. Made her able to see again.

  “It’s so.”

  “So we’re only food for you,” Mara said, her voice tightly controlled.

  The Lady wrung her head back and forth. “It’s not like that. You are my people and I love you. My greatest wish is for everyone in the Goldwater to live to old age and die happy, surrounded by the ones you love.”

  “So the reason no one comes here, no one leaves?”

  The Lady drew into herself, tucking her elbows close to her sides and pulling her head back into the shade of her big cowl neckline. “The towns where I lived before were not understanding. Accepting. I could not stay anywhere for long. So I thought it best to take this town and keep it small. To take one group of people and their families who would grow to know me as a guardian. No need for outsiders. No need to stir up trouble.”

  “The harvesters don’t exist.”

  “No.”

  Mara exhaled a long breath and went to the window. She put her hand on the sill in case she needed the support. It wasn’t even that she didn’t know what to think, what to say—but that she couldn’t think. Every thought felt like spring ice, cold and thin and so brittle.

  “None of those men Keera killed were harvesters.”

  “No,” the Lady said. “Travelers, traders. But you understand, you were still right in your job. You kept the Goldwater safe.”

  Mara clenched her fingers on the edge of the sill. Paint cracked and flaked. She whirled and faced the Lady. “You made Keera look like a harvester. She could have come back!”

  “But she knew. And she would have told you and her man. No one would have been safe here anymore.”

  “You wouldn’t be,” Mara said. “How could we know the truth and still let you live up here, a stinking carrion bird, picking our corpses clean.”

  The Lady hissed and sprang from her chair. “Keep a civil tongue around me, girl,” she said, beak clacking. “And how thin is your outrage when now you have what you’ve always wanted. Your old job back, your old man. Isn’t that so?”

  Mara froze.

  “And don’t forget who gave you those eyes.” The Lady’s chuckle grated on Mara, an unnatural thick sound.

  “Take them back, then,” Mara said, and took three long strides to meet the Lady in front of her chair, where they’d always sat when Mara came for treatment. Only this time Mara reached for the knife in her boot and came up with it gleaming in her hand like a tooth.

  The clockwork finches on the rooftop screamed louder and louder.

  “You don’t know what you have said, girl,” the Lady said, and she drew closer.

  Mara looked at how the tip of the Lady’s beak curved down into a cruel point. She raised the knife.

  The Lady’s head darted out of her cowl faster than Mara could track, and her beak gaped open. Mara fell back, wrenching her head back and slashing out with the knife at the same time. She caught the edge of the Lady’s dress. But the tip of the Lady’s beak caught Mara’s left eye, raking through it and popping it free of its socket, tearing through the flesh of her eyelid down to her cheekbone.

  Mara fell to her knees. She was screaming, she knew, but it didn’t really feel like her. She was only this white-hot pain, the run of blood and fluid down her face and over her hands.

  The Lady stooped over her, and Mara could do nothing. Blood dripped from the Lady’s beak, and she clicked it back and forth as if she were chewing. She brought the beak down against Mara’s jawbone, and then slowly slid it up to rest against her right cheekbone, below her other eye.

  Mara could only gasp for air. Blood ran into her mouth.

  “Let her be, Lady,” said a finch. Mara’s finch. The one who had warned her. “I think you have hurt her enough.”

  The Lady withdrew. “She knows.”

  “She’ll keep quiet,” the finch sa
id. “She knows now not to cross you.”

  Mara curled on the floor with her hands to her face, trying to press everything back in, hold it all together. Her knife was useless on the floor next to her.

  The Lady spoke to Mara, though she didn’t look back. “I didn’t want to do it, girl. I’ve always been fond of you.”

  “You need her,” the finch said. “No one else has her training. Her family is the work. You need them to carry on.”

  The Lady fell quiet a moment, then grasped Mara by the shoulder and pulled them both upright. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

  Mara followed mutely. She couldn’t have walked anywhere on her own—the world through her good eye was edged round in white and prone to spin if she moved too quickly. The Lady sat her down in the velveteen chair and got a pot of cream and a winding of linen bandage. Mara faded in and out of consciousness while the Lady treated the hole where her eye had been.

  She saw Keera, once, and her parents who had gone before, but then she blinked and her vision cleared. The Lady was there once again, twisting her bandage into place.

  When she was done, the Lady looked Mara squarely in the eye and said, “Now that you know, you must choose for yourself what to do. I hope you choose well.”

  She reached up and dabbed a little blood away from the corner of her beak.

  Mara nodded and got up. She had to lever herself out of the chair, leaning hard on the armrests.

  The Lady called after her as she shuffled to the doorway. “I don’t do anyone any harm, you see? The Goldwater is happy because of me.”

  Mara didn’t look back. She kept putting one foot in front of the other until she was down the long hallway and pushing through the door to the outside. The clockwork finch kept pace, flying close beside her.

  She stood at the top of the trailhead, but didn’t start down. Instead, she stared at the town spread below her, the collection of little houses and barns and green fields. Harvest time wasn’t far away.