Lingering Haze (The Elusive Strain Book 1)

by James Berardinelli

  But it might mean everything to the living in West Fork if the fire reavers are headed there next. That’s what I would have said but Gabriel was silent. He bade Marlek a curt goodbye and the wagon continued on its way.

  “We’ll see them again tomorrow. They’ll be at NewTown before nightfall today and will head back to West Fork tomorrow. It’s frustrating, I know, but I understand. Itinerant merchants and tinkers are suspicious by nature and we’ve just woven a tale that’s impossible to accept without proof. We’ll need other firsthand accounts to bolster ours when we present our story to the leaders.”

  We continued on our way southward, the weather brightening as the day wore on. As the heat beat down on us and dried out our clothing and packs, yesterday’s soaking became a memory. But, with the rations having dried up, our stomachs were rumbling. We camped early to give Esme and Stepan an opportunity to catch a few small animals which they expertly skinned and cooked over a fire. The others wolfed down their portions but I picked at mine. Even having lived in Aeris for a while, I wasn’t used to meat this stringy and gamey. It smelled almost rancid and that made it difficult for me to force it down. None of the others seemed to mind and I gave my uneaten portion to Samell, who eagerly accepted it. In return, he gave me the last of his nuts and dried fruits. No matter how much water I quaffed, however, I couldn’t quite wash away the taste. I knew I would need to acclimate. A picky eater wouldn’t survive on a quest.

  The third day out of NewTown dawned bright and clear. We had been traveling for about an hour when we saw another wagon approaching. This one looked much like Marlek’s, although there were only four men aboard. Gabriel’s conversation with them was more cordial but the result was much the same. Despite their shock at hearing his news, they felt it was necessary for them to visit the village before reporting its fate to the West Fork officials. The offered Gabriel a lift but he declined, preferring to remain with our group. I was grateful for that. Even though the route to West Fork was straightforward (just follow the road…), I felt better having someone familiar with the terrain acting as our guide.

  As evening approached, Gabriel informed us that we were about a third of the way between NewTown and West Fork. I asked him if he was surprised we had only seen two wagons thus far.

  “Not really. This time of year, ain’t much trading going on and without goods to trade, why go to NewTown? This road sees a lot more traffic as the weather cools down. Once the harvests come in, there are plenty of goods to trade. Not this year, though. Or likely ever again. People round these parts are superstitious. They won’t want to rebuild in a place that was destroyed like that. Aeris will become cut-off but they’re self-sufficient enough that it won’t hurt their fortunes if no one ever visits.” If Aeris survives. It wasn’t hard to imagine what had happened to NewTown happening to Aeris. In fact, if I hadn’t been there, it might have happened already. And there was no telling if or when the earth reavers would try again.

  Around the time we were contemplating stopping for the night, Marlek’s wagon overtook us on a southward trajectory. The wagon was moving briskly, the horses at a canter. The merchant ordered his driver to pull over when he saw us. As before, the others in his party remained out of sight.

  “You weren’t exaggerating,” Marlek said once Gabriel and I approached within speaking distance. “Never seen a thing like that before and hope I never see another as long as I live and breathe. I was skeptical about everything you claimed, but now… I can’t say what did that to NewTown but I’m more likely to believe a fire reaver than an accident. I’ve got an expert tracker with me. He did a circuit around the entire town and said that if one or two got away, it was a lot. Most of those people, maybe all of those people, died there, burned up in fire and not able to get away. We’re not going to get back to West Fork and find a band of refugees camped outside.

  “We’re headed back. We’ll tell the council and chief elder what’s happened so he can make policy. If they doubt us, which they well might, you and Berick will be along in the next few days to confirm our story. I’d offer you a lift but we don’t have the room.” He seemed almost apologetic about that.

  “I’ll get there. Just a little slower. And, without meaning offense, I’d rather travel with a Summoner. I’ve already seen what she can do in a fight and, as good as your men might be, I’m more likely to live through an encounter with her by my side than with you there.”

  Marlek didn’t look pleased with Gabriel’s assertion but he didn’t argue. Instead, he offered a curt farewell before telling the driver to make haste. Within minutes, they had disappeared down the long, straight road, leaving only a cloud of dust behind them.

  “An attack on Aeris. An attack on NewTown. Why do I get the feeling West Fork is next?” muttered Gabriel. To me, it was more of a when than an if. The salient question was whether it would happen before or after we arrived.

  Chapter Seventeen: West Fork

  Gazing out the window in the middle of the night, I couldn’t see much outside of the small pool of light created by the dim streetlight across the road. By day, I would have seen all the familiar sights: the bushes and trees, the crumbling rock wall separating our property from our next door neighbor’s, Mr. Donvan’s broken-down car parked in his driveway in the same place it had been for as long as I could remember... Night hid so many things but it revealed others.

  I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia had only become a recent companion but since it had first come calling, it had been a reliable visitor. I was tired all the time now. Tired, frustrated, angry. The targets for my ire were diverse: my parents, my sister, my friends, my teachers. They all had it in for me. Things had gotten worse since the fire and, now that we were back in the repaired house, it was unbearable. I hated this room. I hated this window. I hated this view.

  I knew something was wrong with me. Instinctively, logically, I recognized that my thinking was off. The lack of sleep was a symptom, not a cause. The now-familiar rage was building inside me and, like last time, I would have to find an outlet or I’d end up going mad.

  For a brief, dizzying instant, the view outside the window changed. Or appeared to change. I was suddenly looking somewhere else, a benighted forest with stunted trees unlike those in my front yard. I blinked my eyes and it was gone. Of course, it had never really been there in the first place. I was starting to see things. This hadn’t been the first time and it wouldn’t be the last. Time to Google a few of my symptoms and figure out what was wrong with me.

  I froze. He was there. A shadow among the shadows, just outside the streetlight’s reach. I sensed him more than saw him. The same figure who had been lurking around me for months now, always at the periphery of my vision. No one else noticed him - just me. Maybe he was as elusive and illusory as the forest I had glimpsed. Or maybe he wasn’t. Which was the more frightening possibility?

  I awoke. It took me a few disorienting seconds to realize I was lying on a bed in one of West Fork’s three inns. Another dream. Another memory. Another tantalizing fragment of my past. Not as devastating as some of the other recent ones but no less disturbing. Now, with that memory in place, I recognized the forest I had glimpsed in the vision. The Verdant Blight. The place where I had arrived. There were implications to that but I wasn’t sure what they were. How deeply had I been connected to this world before I arrived? And who was the figure who had featured in three of my recovered remembrances?

  Esme, who was sharing the cramped bed with me, stirred, her sleep disturbed by my wakefulness. I was grateful to be here, sleeping somewhere other than on the hard ground alongside the long, dusty road but there was something about the nonchalant mood of this great town that made me uneasy. It seemed wrong that there should be such ordinariness in a place less than 200 miles from the mass funeral pyre of NewTown. It had taken us a week to travel here from that site of devastation and the images of the burnt village still plagued my darker dreams.

  We had reached West Fork late yesterday afternoon. Despit
e being exhausted, we had headed immediately for the council chambers. Although four groups of travelers had preceded us with news of NewTown’s destruction, we had expected our arrival to have been anticipated since we had been the first to come upon the ruins, but we had been turned away, informed that the elders had adjourned for the day. They were aware of the situation and would gladly hear our testimony tomorrow. To me, that was an alarmingly casual attitude for a town whose own future might be in jeopardy. Even Gabriel, who was familiar with the town and the way it worked, had been surprised by the lack of urgency. “It’s not that they don’t believe what they’ve heard but, not having actually seen NewTown, it’s hard to grasp the horror of what happened.” The explanation lacked conviction, however.

  West Fork was an impressive place, at least in comparison to Aeris and what I had seen of NewTown. More a small city than a village, its streets were set up on a grid with one set of roads running north-south and another set running east-west. The town hall had been established in the exact center with all the important buildings clustered around it. Residences were farther out, with the most opulent, sometimes two and three-story houses, closer to the town hall while farms were on the outskirts of habitation. A marketplace with about a two-dozen permanent stalls was situated north of the houses but not as far out as the farms. According to Gabriel, about two-thousand souls called West Fork their permanent home while another several hundred passed through it daily. It lay at the crossroads of The Great Southern Road, which led to dozens of small farming communities in the rich plains to the south, and The Western Highway, which took travelers to the major villages and cities to the east. The North-South Road, which we had used to come here, terminated at West Fork but it was infrequently traveled since its only destinations were NewTown, Aeris, and the wilds beyond.

  The place where we were staying was called The Lantern’s Comfort. It was a grandiose name for a greasy, dirty place. No one else seemed bothered by the lack of hygiene but I was used to Holiday Inns and Radissons. Gabriel, who wasn’t staying here with us, had negotiated the rates which Samell had paid from the handsome assortment of coins given to us by the elders of Aeris. There were two rooms, each as shabby as the other. One was for Esme, Alyssa, and me, and the other housed Samell and Stepan. Octavius had left with Gabriel to go in search of a healer. Since each room had only a single bed - actually little more than a thin straw mattress on a rickety wooden frame - Esme and I shared while Alyssa slept on the floor. Still, even as cramped and uncomfortable as it was, it was vastly superior than sleeping out-of-doors.

  Unable to fall back asleep, I rose, slipped on my boots and wandered downstairs and outside. Both moons were up, bathing the village in a soft white light. I gazed at the two placid orbs and wondered, if only for a moment, if there really might be gods up there. If there were, how had they stayed their hands while the population of NewTown had been roasted? That had always been my central problem with religion, how a supposedly “good” god could allow so much evil and suffering to happen under his watch. Priests and ministers babbled about it being a test or the result of humans being given free will but that all sounded like a rationalization. The reality, as I saw it, was that if there was a god, he was amoral and uncaring. Bad things happened because he couldn’t be motivated to do anything about them. They were part of the natural order and, as such, were beneath his notice. I didn’t believe in a caring, loving god. If there was such an entity, I envisioned him as being so far above us on an evolutionary scale that he would be less concerned about our well-being than we were about ants in the field. But that’s not how the people of my world believed and that’s not how the citizens of these villages believed. They were invested in the four gods of Sovereign, Concord, Ire, and Vasto.

  “Not sleepy?” It was Samell. I hadn’t noticed him when I had exited the building.

  “No. Another memory.” My past, refusing to let me go. Filling in the blanks slowly and in the most inconvenient manner possible. “You?”

  “Stepan snores. Very loudly. I didn’t notice on the road but I certainly did in the room.”

  I chuckled. I had realized it on the road, which is one reason I had always set up my pallet as far from his as possible.

  “What now? What if they don’t listen to us?”

  He was silent for a moment, considering his answer. “It’s out of our control. We tell them what we know, what we saw. It’s up to them to decide what action to take. They’re sending a delegation north tomorrow - first to NewTown then all the way up to Aeris. At least that means they’re taking the situation seriously.”

  “But they may not have much time!”

  “Do you sense an attack? Are you seeing something?”

  “No.” I checked regularly, using magic to amplify my range. There was nothing specific. A few oddities to the northwest at the fringes of what I could identify. More likely some of the unsavory things said to inhabit The Rank Marsh than a massing of earth, air, or fire reavers. “But those fire reavers are still out there somewhere. Just because I can’t find them doesn’t mean they’re not preparing to strike at West Fork.”

  “It also doesn’t mean they are planning to strike at West Fork. We don’t know what their goals and motivations are. To us, it seems random and brutal. To them, probably not. Our duty is to find Bergeron and learn what we can from him. The sooner we do that, the better our chances will be to figure out what’s going on and whether we can stop it.”

  I hung my head. He was right of course, but I shouldn’t have needed him to tell me. My leadership qualities were sorely lacking in some areas.

  “Hey,” he said, taking a step closer to me and draping an arm companionably over my shoulder. “Don’t get down on yourself about this. You’ve adapted remarkably well. In less than a season, you’ve gone from being a naked girl I fished out of the river to a poised young woman with enough magical power to offer us a chance against whatever’s threatening us. You don’t have to do everything and, more importantly, you don’t have to consider it a failure whenever you aren’t able to.”

  “You can be my conscience,” I said, forcing a smile that I didn’t feel in my heart. But I knew he was right about that as well.

  “No, I wouldn’t be good at that. But I’ll be your shadow.”

  Shortly after dawn the next morning, Gabriel arrived to escort us to the town hall, informing us that Octavius wouldn’t be joining us. “The healer is concerned about the nature of his injuries. Claims not to have seen anything like it before. Looks like a burn but isn’t healing like one. So it’s safe to say that Octavius won’t be joining you when you head out to The Southern Peaks.” That left me with four companions and an as-yet undetermined guide. After making our presentation to the elders, hiring someone to take us to Bergeron would be the next task.

  The town hall was designed to impress. Built from giant blocks of polished granite while every other structure was constructed from timber, it was easily the tallest and strongest building in West Fork, towering seventy or eighty feet high. However, although I understood this to be an extraordinary feat of engineering for a culture with the limitations of this one, it didn’t create the sense of wonder in me that it did in my companions.

  Samell noticed my lack of a reaction. “You’ve seen something like this before?”

  “If I could take you to New York City, you’d never recover from the shock. Nearly every building there is bigger and taller than this one and there are some that are, without exaggeration, twenty times as high.” The strange things I could remember…

  He raised an eyebrow. “Someday, when we have some time, I’d like to hear more about the world you come from, or at least what you remember about it. It sounds like a magical place.”

  Magical - exactly what it wasn’t. There was no magic there. Or was there? It was a question I might never be able to answer and I wasn’t sure it was relevant, but some of my fragmented memories caused me to wonder.

  Our audience with the town elders did
n’t inspire confidence that anything was going to be done. They listened to Gabriel’s account of our travels and asked a few questions. After being informed that I was a newly arrived Summoner, they showed a little interest but, when I was unwilling to “prove myself” by showing them a parlor trick or two (mainly because I wanted to avoid the headache not because I was shy about using magic), they dismissed me as a charlatan. After spending five minutes with them, I was convinced that no matter what we did or said, it wasn’t going to matter. They didn’t care what had or hadn’t happed at NewTown. They were concerned about West Fork and, to their thinking, the only relevance was that they had lost a trading partner - and not a very important one. They weren’t curious about what had destroyed NewTown and couldn’t conceive that it might pose a threat to them. Had I validated my legitimacy to their satisfaction, no doubt they would have congratulated me, wished me well, and provided no tangible aid whatsoever.

  After exiting the building, I muttered a few choice phrases that caused Gabriel’s eyebrows to lift. “I didn’t think you knew words like those!” His mock indignation lightened my darkening mood.

  “That was a waste of time,” I said.

  “Not necessarily. You have to understand how these politicians work. They say one thing in public and do another behind the scenes. I guarantee they’re worried but can’t show it. They have to act like either nothing really happened or, if something happened, it wasn’t as bad as we’re saying. Public confidence cannot be allowed to waver. Fear could cause civil unrest, undermine their authority, and potentially hurt trade. And they can’t acknowledge you without proof of who you are because, as much as they might want to believe you, if it turned out you were a fraud, they would look like fools. And there’s nothing a leader hates more than seeming like a fool.”