The White City

by John Claude Bemis

  “You belong with us!” Ray shouted. “You belong with those who love you.”

  Jolie’s eyes flashed. “A siren loves only her sisters! I will not wind up like …”

  “Like who?” Ray asked.

  “Like my mother.” She turned from the river and headed back to their camp.

  “Jolie?” Ray called. “Jolie. Wait. I don’t understand.”

  When he caught up with her, she was kicking dirt onto the dying coals of their cookfire. “You cannot understand,” she said.

  Ray waved his arms in frustration. “That’s because you’re not letting me. I thought you cared about us—”

  “I do,” Jolie said, snapping around to face him.

  “Clearly you don’t,” Ray said. “You’re just like your sisters. You only care about your own kind.”

  She grabbed his arm with a hard grip. “Would I be here if that were true?”

  Ray looked away and pulled his arm from her grasp to walk past her. “Where’s that horse? We need to go.”

  Jolie sighed. “I will find her.”

  When she left, Ray closed his eyes tightly and forced Jolie from his thoughts. He linked with B’hoy and saw the rough land on the other side of the ridge beyond the creek. B’hoy was soaring low, keeping from the sight of the steamcoach. Trudging along with its belching blasts of coal smoke and steam, the steamcoach roared across the hills. B’hoy circled so Ray could see their position coming up a ridge not far away.

  Ray opened his eyes. “They’ve gotten ahead of us! We’ve got to hurry.”

  Jolie had Élodie by the reins. “She is exhausted. We have ridden her too hard. And look how she holds her back foot. I am not certain how fast she can go.”

  Ray knelt to inspect her hoof. “A stone bruise, maybe,” he said, giving Élodie a gentle pat. “Sally’s not far. Hopefully she can get us to her before those agents do.”

  Jolie frowned. She waited as Ray lit a branch of the sagebrush and dropped it into the jar before climbing into the saddle. She got on behind him and took the jar. Élodie ascended the hill up onto the ridgeline without faltering. When they reached the top, Ray spied the steamcoach’s smoke over a series of hills to the west. He shook the reins, and Élodie began trotting.

  She would not go into a gallop, but she rode up and down, over the rises, closer and closer to the steamcoach. With the mountains looming ever nearer, cottonwoods and other trees grew along the lower washes. B’hoy swooped back and forth across their path before sailing out ahead of them, keeping low to the earth. They were passing out of the barren sagebrush waste and into the eastern shadow of the Rockies.

  Before long they crested a rise to see the steamcoach only a quarter mile to the south, atop a nearby ridge. Ray urged Élodie faster as Jolie kept watch on the agents.

  “Ray!” she said sharply. “They have a—”

  A rifle shot rang out. Élodie reared up with a whinny. Ray dropped low across the horse’s neck and raced her down from the hilltop. Jolie was watching over her shoulder, and once they were out of sight of the steamcoach, she said, “They were not shooting at us.”

  Ray stopped Élodie and cocked his head to hear the shouting voices in the distance. “Are you sure?”

  “The agent fired the rifle at something ahead of us,” she said. “They were not even looking in our direction.”

  They got down from the saddle and crept to the hilltop. On the other ridge, the steamcoach had stopped. The agents were climbing out from the doors, pointing to something farther up the slope of the hill where Ray and Jolie hid, but not in their direction.

  “What are they doing?” Jolie asked.

  Then B’hoy flapped up behind them and landed at Ray’s feet with a croak. “B’hoy!” Ray growled. “They must have spotted him.”

  Ray turned back to the agents. Muggeridge still sat on the driving bench, with the engine sputtering smoke, but other armed agents were spreading out slowly, searching the surrounding hilltops.

  “We should go,” Jolie said, pulling on Ray’s elbow.

  Ray did not move, his eyes narrowed with thought.

  “Come,” she said again.

  “The Bowlers think the Hoarhound is leading them to me, right? They think I have the rabbit’s foot. I’m who they’re after.”

  “It does not matter—”

  “It does!” Ray said. “Élodie is injured, and if we don’t do something now, that steamcoach will catch Sally before we can reach her.”

  He turned back to Élodie and dug through the rucksack on the saddle to take out a piece of pemmican. Stuffing it in his pocket, he drank from the waterskin before handing it to Jolie.

  “Do you think you can handle Élodie?” he asked.

  “Yes. But why? What are you going to do?”

  Voices grew louder.

  Ray’s expression hardened. “Let them capture me.”

  “What!” Jolie gasped.

  He pointed toward the mountains. “I need you to go after Sally and Quorl. You know how to follow their tracks. You can find her.”

  “But this is madness!” Her eyes flashed fiercely. “You are hurt by what I said, and you are not thinking clearly—”

  “I’m thinking fine,” he grumbled.

  “What will happen to you?”

  “They won’t kill me. They want to bring me to the Gog.”

  “And you will let them?”

  Élodie was pulling nervously, and Ray took her reins to calm her. “Not if I can help it. We just need to hold those agents up long enough for you to reach Sally.”

  “But they will know … the Hoarhound can sense the rabbit’s foot—”

  “Get up,” Ray said, motioning for Jolie to climb into the saddle. “I’ll figure something out. I’ll catch up with you if I can. Just go!”

  Jolie opened her mouth as if to continue arguing but instead grabbed the saddle horn and swiftly pulled herself up. She took the reins from Ray and locked him in a furious gaze, but Ray saw her hand trembling.

  They stared at each other until Jolie tossed her head, scattering her windblown hair from her face, and rode off toward the trees.

  Wasting no time, Ray turned to B’hoy. “We need to get their attention. Move rapidly so they won’t get a good shot and draw them back my way. I’ll head down there.” He pointed to the east, away from the direction Jolie rode, to the forest at the bottom of the hill.

  B’hoy cawed and flew up to disappear over the hillcrest. Ray ran. As he reached the tree line, he heard gunfire resume. He looked back west, but Jolie had already vanished into the forest.

  Shouting voices rose and the thudding and skittering of footsteps on loose earth came from beyond the ridge. B’hoy darted downward, arrow-like above the treetops. Ray watched a moment from the shadows as the first agent’s bowler hat came over the ridgeline.

  “There he is!” the man shouted.

  Ray turned and ran into the forest. After a few dozen yards, he stopped and waited for the agents to arrive.

  THE ROUGAROU FLICKED HIS HEAD UP AND AIMED HIS SILVER-BLUE snout down at the sun-baked plains below.

  “What is it, Quorl?” Sally asked, coming out from the comfortable shade of the trees and closer to the edge of the bluff.

  “A gunshot.” His human-like eyes, the only part of him that still showed his true form, stared hard in the distance. “There—another. And still more. Can you hear it, child?”

  Sally cocked her head, holding back her blond curls from her ear. “No. I don’t hear anything.”

  “My hearing is very strong, little Coyote,” Quorl said. “I am not mistaken. They are guns.”

  “Maybe it’s just hunters,” Sally wondered.

  “Of one sort or another,” Quorl said.

  Sally gave Quorl a worried look. “Do you mean that? Do you think we’re being followed?”

  “Possibly … I have seen a strange black smoke at times in the distance behind us. It could be the locomotive that appeared at the Great Tree as we left.”

&n
bsp; As Quorl rose, Sally quickly said, “We don’t have to go yet, do we? Why don’t you rest longer? You’ve carried me so far, and I can tell you’re weakening.”

  He took a few steps. “It is not the effort of our journey that weakens me.”

  “What is it, then?” Sally asked.

  “As a steward of the Great Tree, I am not meant to be away from it. You know what happened to my pack when the Great Tree disappeared.”

  She remembered how the rougarou had lost their true forms, transforming first bodily into wolves and then in mind as well, eventually turning viciously on Quorl, the only one of the pack who had not forgotten he was a rougarou. They would have killed him had Sally not helped locate the Great Tree in time.

  “We have gone too far away from it now,” Quorl said in his grim, expressionless tone. “I feel its distance and will suffer for it. More so because the Great Tree is dying. That is why we must keep going. We must find your father if the Tree is to be healed.”

  Sally looked at the slope ahead and the rugged pass leading up into the mountains. The rabbit’s foot had already led her nearly across the country. How much farther would she have to go?

  She had left Shuckstack believing that only she could rescue her father. After all, she had given Nel back his leg and returned his Rambler powers. She could use the rabbit’s foot—her father’s hand that had been severed by the Hoarhound—to help him as she had helped Nel. With his powers returned, her father could then escape from the Gloaming. He would surely be able to stop the Gog’s Machine and save the Great Tree. If only she could reach him where he was trapped in the Gloaming …

  But to return his hand to him would come at a terrible cost.

  Sally had discovered through her father’s book, The Incunabula of Wandering, that the rabbit’s foot was needed to destroy the Gog’s Machine. Mother Salagi had described it as “the light to pierce the Dark.” If she saved her father, if she gave him back his hand and his powers, the weapon to stop the Gog would be lost.

  But how could she not save her father? Although she had never met him, she believed, she had always hoped, that one day they would be together. Oh, what was she to do? Sally could hardly think on it all.

  “Which way?” Quorl asked.

  Sally gave a miserable sigh and took the rabbit’s foot from her dress pocket to check the direction. “Quorl!”

  He snapped his head around. “What is it?”

  Sally held out the rabbit’s foot, then moved it back and forth in front of her, watching the golden foot rotate in her palm until the tiny claws pointed west.

  “Nothing … for a moment, I thought it was glowing.” She put the rabbit’s foot back in her pocket. “It must have just been the light reflecting off of it. Shall we go?” She pointed. “That way.”

  The two set out, slowly climbing farther up the pass into the mountain wilderness.

  As evening fell, they made camp by a stream, where Quorl caught a few trout with his paws. Sally was used to eating the silky cold meat raw now, and with the bountiful wax currants and early season nuts Quorl had found for her, her stomach was full for the first time since she’d left the Great Tree.

  “I don’t know what I would do without you, dear Quorl,” Sally said contentedly as she popped the last of the berries into her mouth. “I can figure out mysteries in the Incunabula but not how to start a fire or what’s safe to eat. I’d never even be able to feed myself if you weren’t here.”

  “You survived on the open prairie before you met me,” he reminded her.

  “Only because I had Hethy.”

  Quorl gave a soft chuckle. “Well, not to worry. I am with you. And the desert is behind us. We will eat much better now up in these mountains.” Quorl stretched out on the mossy ground by the banks of the stream.

  The first stars were coming out and the air was growing cool. Sally leaned closer to Quorl’s warm side. “Quorl?” she began. “How will we reach my father?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “The Toninyan is leading you, is it not?”

  “What I mean is …” She paused to gather her thoughts. “Father is in the Gloaming. How are we going to cross over? Can you cross?”

  “The rougarou’s powers are not like those of the Ramblers,” he said. “We cannot cross anywhere we wish. I can only cross using the Great Tree.”

  A sinking feeling came over Sally. “Then how will we ever reach Father?”

  Quorl gave her an assuring look. “Your father is not in this world. He is in the Gloaming. And yet, the Toninyan pulls you toward something in this world. What do you think that is?”

  “I have no idea,” Sally sighed.

  “There are thresholds. Thin places in the fabric between the worlds where the Great Tree’s branches come close to us. The rabbit’s foot pulls you toward your father, so he must be just beyond one of these thresholds. I will be able to help you across.”

  Sally shifted anxiously. “Unless the branches of the Tree are too brittle.”

  “We will hope they are not,” Quorl said. “We are a long way from the Gog’s Machine here.”

  Sally felt better knowing that Quorl could help her across one of these thresholds, but her thoughts were awhirl with other worries. At last she asked, “What will happen if the Great Tree dies? Will … will everyone die? Would I die too?”

  “No.” His gruff voice was not especially reassuring. “You would not die. But if the Gog’s Machine kills the Great Tree, it will bring something altogether worse than death for humankind. You would be soulless. You would become something that felt no kinship or compassion for the rest of humanity or the world in which you live.”

  Sally shivered. “Would you know if the Tree died?”

  “I would know, little Coyote,” Quorl replied.

  “How?” Sally asked.

  “I would know,” he repeated.

  Sally wriggled back and forth, moving closer to Quorl. “Would you die with it?”

  Quorl’s voice was growing raspy. “Yes. I would pass from this world as well.”

  Sally wondered for a moment before asking, “Where did you come from, Quorl? Did the rougarou come from the top of the Great Tree—from that world beyond?”

  “No, from beneath the earth, I think. I believe I recall that we ascended in our true forms from some lower world up to this one. Possibly up another Tree. Or maybe it was the same. I … I am having trouble … trouble r-r-r”—his voice broke into a low, guttural growl—“not … r-r-remember-r-ring now.”

  Sally lifted her head quickly from his fur. Quorl’s tongue dangled from his long teeth. He was panting heavily all of a sudden. He rose to his feet and trod around in a circle.

  “Quorl?” she asked anxiously.

  He shook his head as if clearing away some thought. Then he spoke, his voice returning to its normal pitch. “I … I am sorry.” He slumped back to the ground, panting. “I just need to rest. Let us sleep now.” He laid his snout on his front paws and closed his eyes.

  She had seen how Renamex and the other rougarou had lost themselves, their minds becoming those of wolves just as their bodies were. Quorl was too far from the Tree. He was changing.

  She nestled against his side and hoped he was right. Maybe a good night’s rest would help.

  The following day as they continued to climb the pass, Sally watched Quorl closely and thankfully saw no noticeable return of the strange behavior from the night before. But Quorl seemed troubled and barely spoke as they traveled.

  They crossed through lush forests of spruce and aspen, over meadows of wildflowers, and into still other forests of tall lodgepole pines. Ground squirrels and mule deer, marmots and coyotes scampered from them as they approached, and once Sally spied a golden eagle soaring above the mountainside.

  “This is a marvelous place,” Sally remarked. “So lovely, but it seems we travel so slow.” She pointed to a snow-covered summit in the distance. “I’ve watched that mountain peak all day. Now it’s late afternoon, and we seem no cl
oser to it than when we started this morning.”

  With his head low, Quorl growled.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  He kept walking and did not answer.

  Later that afternoon, they entered a broad valley with a meandering river, and the rabbit’s foot led them toward a glacier squeezed between two sheer mountains. Quorl stopped as they reached the field of ice. A rumble reverberated from his chest, and he began trotting back the way they’d come.

  “Where are you going?” Sally called, pointing to the glacier. “The rabbit’s foot says that’s the direction.”

  Quorl barked angrily, and Sally backed away a step.

  The rougarou lowered his head and flipped his ears side to side. “That r-route.” He paused, barked in frustration, and then tried once more. “Too steep. Go back.” He threw his nose toward the range running up from the valley floor. “We go up on that r-r-ridge.” He waited for her to follow.

  With a shudder, Sally walked with Quorl back the way they had come. Soon he led them up a steep climb along a thickly timbered slope. When they reached the top of the ridge, Quorl began sniffing the ground.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Hor-r-rse,” Quorl growled.

  “A mustang, maybe,” Sally said. “We saw some the other day.” She watched as Quorl stood panting, his ribs sucking tightly against his silver body. “You’re getting worse,” she said. “Aren’t you?”

  “Ther-r-re is nothing we can do,” he said quietly.

  “What about those doorways, Quorl?” Sally said desperately. “You said there were places where you could cross over to the Great Tree. Find one of those and cross over! It will help you. It will make you better.”

  A whine sounded from his throat. He struggled to speak. “I would if I could. The Tr-r-ree is dying. And with it the door-r-rways are disappear-r-ring. We have to hope we r-r-reach your father befor-re that threshold is lost also.”

  Sally wrung her hands anxiously. “We should rest,” she suggested, hoping it might help revive him. “I’m hungry. Could you find us some food?”