by J. C. Staudt
“You hard of hearing, Shep? Fella didn’t give us a name. Sounds like you got plenty of enemies, so I don’t see as it makes much matter. In another life I might’ve taken you up on that offer. But this one here, she don’t take kindly to double-dealin’. Says we ought to keep to our word, and all that hogwash.”
Weaver gave Lokes a sour grin. “What my associate here is trying to tell you is that we won’t be bought. You can work out whatever deal you like with the man after we give you to him.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t leave. If I leave Unterberg without telling Mr. Vantanible, he’ll brand me a traitor, or a spy, and have me hunted down and killed.”
“Don’t sound like the kind of dway you ought to be kickin’ around with anyhow,” said Lokes. “I figure we’re doing you a favor. Now, if you’d be so kind as to turn toward me and put your hands behind your back, this nice young lady here’ll get you all squared away. I know you’re thinkin’ ‘bout trying to skedaddle on me. Don’t do it, Shep. I’ll put one through the back of your knee, sure as a dimple on a butt cheek. You don’t want us hauling you through the sand on a bad leg. We’ll do it if we got to.”
Toler set his jaw as he turned to face the man and crossed his wrists behind his back. He felt the cut of thin plastic as the woman zipped his bonds tight.
Lokes moved into the light, his wide-brimmed hat cleaving a thin, ruddy face in a diagonal slash of shadow. “There now. That’s a good Shep. Wasn’t so bad, was it? Where you stable your horse at?”
“My horse?”
“You got one, don’t you?”
“Sure.”
“Well, we got a long road ahead of us, and too little time to get on down it. Since you decided to keep both your knees, better you ride than walk.”
Toler bent over and vomited on Lokes’s boots.
“What the shit, you little—”
“Sorry. Sorry,” Toler croaked, spitting. “I get starwind sickness.”
Lokes stepped back to wipe his boots on a black plastic garbage bag. “You do that again, you gonna find one of these cowhides tickling your tonsils, boy.”
Toler heard Weaver chuckle behind him.
Lokes looked past Toler to glower at her. “You think that’s funny, do you? I told you we should’ve knocked him out cold.”
“He gonna ride with you, then?” Weaver asked. “‘Cause I’d rather we find out where he keeps his horse.”
Toler was ready for bed, not for a days-long ride through the desert. “You can’t take me. I’m sick. I’ll hold you up.”
Lokes’s eyes met Toler’s. “I’ll be honest. I don’t want to share a saddle with you, Shep. I don’t want to hit you over the head, neither. But I’ll do what I gotta do. So let’s not make us a big ordeal outta this, huh? You fixin’ to tell me where your horse is, or would you rather us buy that half-blind swayback with the bad hip we saw for sale a few blocks down?”
There was no use resisting them. Willis Lokes had a look in his eyes that told Toler he meant what he said. And the woman… this Jallika Weaver… there was something different about her. Something Toler couldn’t place, but which he disliked all the same. He gave a long sigh, not sure what he was in for, but certain he wasn’t going to like it. “Follow me.”
CHAPTER 20
Stirrings in Molehind
Far from home was the last place Lizneth had ever expected to be right now. It was the last place she wanted to be, with or without her aging parents and the dozen-and-a-half siblings stumbling and bumbling through the tunnels, clangorous as a kitchener’s wagon. Between all the shoving and squabbling and an apparent dearth of experience walking in a straight line, they might as well have been a traveling circus for all the ruckus they made. If a cotterphage ever came within shouting distance, it was going to make a tasty morsel out of someone. Probably someone small.
Lizneth didn’t like thinking about that, so she turned her mind to other things. Like how tired she was of shushing her brothers and sisters every other minute. Her legs were sore, her arms ached from stints carrying the little ones, and the comfort of the darkness ahead made it hard to keep her eyes open. The thing that alarmed her most, however, was that the longer they walked, the more her stomach began to ache.
They had stopped only once so far, crowding into a niche beside the road to nap for a few hours. Tanley was far behind them now, Molehind only a short distance ahead if they were going the right way. Lizneth and Papa thought they were close, judging by the haick; Mama, whose nose was not what it used to be, had her doubts.
“I remember Molehind well, and that isn’t it,” Mama insisted.
“It is, Kyriah,” Papa told her. “I’ve been there more recently than you have, and I know it.”
Mama cocked her head and gave Papa a disbelieving look. “If you say so, Halak.”
Papa fumed, but said nothing. Those two had been as bad as the nestlings since they left home. Lizneth didn’t know how they managed sometimes. Mama had borne her last litter a year ago, but Lizneth reckoned she and Papa should’ve stopped long before that. Breeding to fill Sniverlik’s ranks did little good if the Marauders couldn’t even protect Tanley from a bunch of blundering hu-mans.
Molehind was lofted high within a forest of thick mineral pillars, the sort created by the slow drip of sediment over thousands of years. Circular platforms girdled huts and dwellings carved into the pillars themselves, while bridges and walkways spanned the gaps between. There was a magical quality to that quiet sanctum high in the darkness. The tunnels leading here ran close to the surface, so its residents were forever wary of the predators who often wandered down from the blind-world with empty bellies.
Lizneth and her family were no predators, so the ikzhehn of Molehind extended a narrow ramp and let them climb to the heights. She noticed at once the brindled fur patterns of many of Molehind’s inhabitants. Most were generations removed from the burrow-kin, though they shared traces of that bloodline.
Papa’s brood-brother Enzak lived in a stucco hut attached to the side of a broad pillar near the village center. The way the hardened mud stucco swirled across the hut’s surface in striated patterns reminded Lizneth of a hornet’s nest. She was pleasantly surprised to find that her Uncle Enzak was a scearib like her, though he made no mention of it when he greeted them.
He took Lizneth and her family inside, where he introduced them to his mate Pomka and their two broods. The hut was cramped already, and with the addition of Lizneth’s family they were practically crawling on top of each other. Before long they spilled out onto the causeway, where the two brood-brothers wandered off to discuss recent events, leaving Lizneth, her mother, and Pomka to watch the nestlings.
Lizneth was feeling even worse now, so she sat by the wayside as the children scampered and played across the platforms. Mama noticed her with a hand to her belly and came to check on her.
“Don’t you feel well?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter, cuzhe?”
“I’m not well in my djigdeh.”
Mama’s look of concern only lasted a moment before two misbehaving nestlings stole her attention. “Malak, what did I tell you? Do not hang your sister over the railing. Malak. Malak.” Mama wandered away to chase him down.
Lizneth stood and went to Pomka, who had a new-birth on each hip but was less preoccupied than Mama at the moment. “Who is the chabad in this village?”
“The chabad here is one they call Kolki. Is everything alright?”
“Yes. Where can I find her?”
“She is two platforms above us, along that pillar, there.”
“Thank you,” Lizneth said. “Tell Mama I’ll be back in a short while. If she asks, please don’t tell her where I’ve gone.”
Pomka nodded and gave her a soft smile, but Lizneth was not sure there was much in it to rely upon. On her way up the ramps, her thoughts turned to Raial and Thrin. She wondered how they were getting along in Sniverlik’s stronghold without Mama and Papa. They
were young, even for conscripts. Her heart ached to think of adventurous little Raial, with his fearless spirit and his nose for curiosity, broken and scared and alone. Or Thrin—sweet, innocent Thrin—who probably knew nothing about what was happening or why she’d been taken.
The entrance to Kolki’s hut was veiled in hanging strands of glazed clay beads. Lizneth knocked on the wattle beside the opening, but her rapping yielded only dull, soundless thuds. She called inside and waited a few seconds, then gave her surroundings a glance and entered. A sweet smoky fragrance assailed her within, so strong she went cross-eyed and light-headed for a moment. She scanned the hut’s dim interior for signs of life, hoping she wasn’t intruding.
“Hello? Is anyone here? I’m looking for Kolki.”
“A deepling comes to consult me about the harvest,” said a thin, ragged voice.
Lizneth noticed her then, an old dam seated behind a wicker screen, visible only by silhouette in the flickering candlelight. She took another step into the hut and said, “With respect… it’s not the harvest I’m here about.”
“When a parikua comes to see a chabad, it is for one of two reasons: she wants the crops to grow, or the river to flow.”
“For me, it’s different,” Lizneth said. “I’m sick.”
“Sick? Is that the name by which it goes?” Kolki chuckled, then grunted as she pushed herself up with her tail. When she rounded the screen, Lizneth found herself looking at a stout little agouti with flashes of fawn and white running through her fur. Kolki’s head and shoulders were hooded in a thin crimson scarf, beneath which Lizneth saw bones knotted in the fur between her ears. She had a slender snout and long pinback whiskers that glimmered with a healthy sheen when she twitched them.
“I feel unwell in my belly,” Lizneth explained.
Kolki chuckled again. “Come with me, deepling.” She gathered up a canteen, a small shoulder bag, a walking stick, and a pair of eyeshades, which she donned before gesturing for Lizneth to follow.
They ascended to the next-highest platform by a wooden staircase whose steps jutted from the pillar like spokes on a wheel. This, Lizneth discovered, was the highest platform beneath the cave ceiling. Ahead lay a natural channel through the rock, which the people of Molehind had connected to a long wooden ramp for easier access. Lizneth could feel the blind-world’s heat as soon as her feet left the wood and touched rock. “Where are we going?” she asked.
Kolki lifted her eyeshades. “On a walk.”
Lizneth didn’t want to walk. She’d been walking for days. What she wanted to do was sit and rest and drink a tonic for the pains in her belly. Every step made her stomach quake, and she had begun to feel as if it might come loose. But she kept silent for the time being and followed Kolki up the path’s gentle slope.
They emerged into mountainous dusk, a high cliff shrouded in dry brambles. To their right, the light-star was setting beyond the vale, its last rays disappearing behind the peaks of the distant Brinescales. Above them, the darkening sky swirled with curtains of shimmering color. Kolki continued up the rocky slope, picking her way through patches of scree and stones fallen from the cliffside above.
At the top of the climb, they could see the northern lands spread out before them, a sight Lizneth had never thought could be so different from the desert scrubland of the vale. Still a wasteland, to be sure, but one where the tracts of growth were not so sparse or brown. There was life blooming in the valleys below, and with it came the scent of newness. She could even see the color green against the dusk—real green, though maybe not as vibrant as the leaves of her mulligraws—green enough to speak against the blind-world’s wilting heat.
“The short year is upon us, deepling,” said Kolki, inhaling deeply to catch her breath. “The days grow shorter, and growing things that have waited patiently will sprout anew. By the end of the winter season, the calaihn will have taken their harvest from the lands which sustain it, only to wait out the long year’s oppression once again. As the light-star turns across the sky, so do our lives turn across the years.”
“I’ve seen the blind-world before,” Lizneth complained. “I’ve seen calaihn, too. I don’t understand what this has to do with helping me feel better.”
“Oh, my little lecuzhe. You are not sick.”
“Yes I am,” Lizneth insisted. “I am. I don’t feel well at all.”
“Things do not always happen for the reasons we assume. Why, take our visitor here, for example…” Kolki extended an arm toward the northern valley, unfurling her fingers like the spines along a glowfish’s back.
There was someone down there. A hu-man. He was on foot, traveling south, roughly in their direction. It looked as though he aimed to take the low mountain pass rather than climb the ridge from which they overlooked him. Dark shapes swarmed around him, four-legged things with slender bodies and sharp, narrow heads. They circled him like predators after a wounded animal, but it seemed there was no hostility between the hu-man and these creatures. Lizneth could hear the things making noises, yips and whines and snarls. The hu-man bent over and touched one of them. The thing shot away from the group at a gallop and disappeared from view behind a cluster of stones.
“Who’s that?” Lizneth asked.
“A harbinger,” said Kolki.
“How do you know that?”
“I am the chabad,” Kolki said, “and you are not. I know because I know.”
Mama thinks my manners are bad, Lizneth thought. “Why did you bring me up here if you aren’t going to answer any of my questions?”
“You are rude, for a deepling,” Kolki observed.
Lizneth was startled. “I was just thinking the same thing. Only, about you. Did you… know what I was thinking?”
“A guest should be more considerate. I take my walks each evening before nightfall, regardless of whether a deepling wanders into my home with questions whose answers are staring her right in the face or not.”
“Sorry to have bothered you. You could’ve just told me to come back later.”
“Had you come later, I would have told you to come back tomorrow.”
Lizneth gave a loud sigh. “The answers are staring me in the face, are they? All I can see is the world getting dark.”
Kolki laughed to herself. “Yes. As it has been, for some time.”
“And the calai down in that valley is a harbinger?”
“That is no calai, deepling. In taking on the appearance of one, the visitor has shown us his true intent.”
“I’m guessing if I asked you what his intent was, you’d give me some vague, cryptic answer,” Lizneth said, frustrated.
“You are pregnant.”
Lizneth began to speak, but the words caught in her throat. “Huh?” was all she could manage.
“I am unable to offer you a more direct answer than that.”
“What do you mean I’m pregnant? Me? That’s impossible.”
Kolki gave her a skeptical look. “Is it?”
“Well… I guess not. No.”
“And if it is not impossible, then you have spoken falsely. Yes?”
Lizneth hesitated. “Yes. But I thought—”
“You thought you were sick. I know. You are not sick.”
“How can you tell? You haven’t even examined me.”
“Do you want to know how many young ledozhehn have come to me with these same concerns? I hope you don’t, because the number is too many, and I have lost count.”
Lizneth found herself shaking her head in disbelief. “No. I can’t be pregnant. I can’t.”
“As we have concluded already… you can be, and you are.”
“But this will ruin everything. We’ve lost our fields, and our home, and Mama and Papa are too old for planting and harvesting anyway. The Marauders took my brood-siblings, and the nestlings are too young still. Maybe in a season or two, but not yet. And if I can’t, then… oh, what have I done?” Tired and desperate, Lizneth broke into tears. She hated Artolo the Nuck for what he’d don
e to her; for what he had made her feel like doing with him. He had been kind to her. He had made her trust him. For that, she hated herself more than him. Hated herself for letting him, for giving into it—even though she’d wanted to. Had she wanted to?
It would’ve been easier to blame it all on Artolo, but that wouldn’t have been the whole truth. And to learn later that he was Morish’s son… What would become of her new-births, if this condition of his was passed down to them? She remembered Morish’s sickly haick, and Artolo’s words came back to her. It’s a flesh-borne disease, he had said. You just… decay. Over time, the muscles and the skin lose their strength. Like putting meat in a stew; it gets soft and tender and falls apart…
The idea made her shudder. She could not bear to see something so terrible happen to offspring of her own blood. What use was birthing them, if their lives were only to be spent in torment? “I don’t want to have them,” she decided aloud.
Kolki put a finger to her longteeth and hushed her.
Lizneth sniffed, wiping her snout with an arm. “What is it?”
“Our visitor has spotted us.”
The calai—or whatever he was—had stopped in his tracks. The creatures were still prowling about his feet, but he was standing like a statue, his face upturned toward the ridge. Kolki lifted a tentative hand and waved. Lizneth still thought the harbinger looked very much like a hu-man kedozhe, broad-shouldered and thin about the waist.
He stood and watched them for a long time, feet spread as if to brace himself against an earthquake. Lizneth could see the sky’s strange purple light reflected in his eyes and knew he was staring at them, unblinking. Under his gaze, a feeling of unease took her. Whenever she tried to move or speak, Kolki shut her down.
“Why is he staring at us?” Lizneth finally managed to blurt out.
“Because one of us has failed to respect his need for silence,” said Kolki. “Guess which one of us that is. Don’t guess. Hush up.”
After a short while, Lizneth’s uneasiness became too much. She felt eyes on the back of her neck, though she could plainly see the figure watching them from below. She wanted to go back to Molehind. Kolki, however, remained focused on the strange, hu-man-like creature, though it was long past dark. Still the harbinger stood motionless while his beasts danced and played about his feet. Then, without warning, he was gone.
