Song of Edmon

by Adam Burch

  What does he want in return? That’s the key to everyone, isn’t it? Find what they want.

  “Faria, please—”

  “Why do you wish to save this man?” he interrupts.

  “He’s my friend,” I insist again. The dark man sits and stares blankly. My answer does not satisfy him. “Because he’s an islander like me, like you.”

  Faria looks like no islander I’ve ever seen, but where else could he come from with his dark skin and strange appearance? Even if I’m wrong, perhaps my assumption will illuminate the truth.

  “You think to save this man because he’s like you. You think to appeal to me because I may be like you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You think geographical proximity of birth or the color of a man’s skin makes him worth saving?”

  “No,” I answer firmly.

  “Then answer better,” he commands.

  “Because he’s a human being with a life. He’s suffering. I want to save him because it’s the right thing to do,” I say honestly.

  “Be careful what you deem right and wrong. Life is suffering,” he says simply. “You may do him no favors by prolonging it.”

  I didn’t come here to debate philosophy with an old tusk walrus. I will not back down.

  “I don’t work for kindness,” he says. “I keep prisoners healthy. I get privacy. I mend broken bones, stitch lacerations, and receive immunity from the gangs and their feuds. I soothe pestilence; I’m rewarded with food and equipment. I keep miners strong to mine the ore for the noble houses of Tao. My commission is autonomy. What do you offer, son of Leontes? Your name’s not gold here.”

  “I have nothing, but the rags of a man I didn’t mean to kill. You can have those or any debt you see fit.”

  “That is all? Interesting. You will give up so much more before it’s done.” He smiles crookedly.

  A pact has been made.

  “So a killer would save a man he hardly knows because life is precious?” he asks.

  “I’m no killer.”

  “Grinner died on his own, I suppose?”

  “I’ve not killed before today,” I protest.

  “All men are killers, today or tomorrow. What does it matter?” he asks.

  “It was an accident.”

  “Yet still, he’s dead.” Faria rises to his feet.

  His hands are outstretched like a blind man’s. I reach out to guide him to the portal of his igloo. No sooner does my hand contact his arm then he grabs my wrist and twists it with incredible strength. He snaps the bones of my finger effortlessly. I’m too shocked to cry out, but I pull my hand away in flashing pain.

  “Don’t touch me,” he says softly.

  “I was trying to guide you,” I say, breathing through clenched teeth.

  “Guidance is not required.” With that, he crawls out of the igloo.

  Faria’s already examining Toshi with dark and wrinkled fingers when I crawl from the porthole. It’s nearly twenty degrees colder outside.

  “He was shot by the tower guard in his upper right thigh,” I offer.

  “Greelo has excellent aim,” Faria replies. “Your friend wasn’t meant to survive. He was to have been left, a lesson for the rest of you.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  Faria shrugs. “They marked him as someone who wouldn’t contribute much of his weight in ore.”

  “That’s a reason?” My cheeks flush with anger.

  “They need a reason? He’s a Hauler now. You’re a Picker.”

  “So?”

  “You’ll learn. Let’s get him inside.” Together, we drag Toshi into the igloo. It hurts my ribs, and my broken finger screams with pain, but we manage to lay him by the fire.

  “Leave me to work,” Faria says. I look around the room. There’s no antiseptic, no instruments, and no medical tools of any kind. “If you want him alive, you’ll leave,” the old man says again forcefully.

  I grimace. I don’t like this and don’t want to return to the cold outside the hut, but I’m playing by his rules. I reluctantly crawl back out and stand in the freezing cold, fuming. My breath turns to puffy white clouds in front of my face. The charlatan first refuses to help, breaks my finger, and then forces me to stand outside in the bitter freeze and wait!

  And I wait and wait . . . I huddle up to the igloo exterior. I look at my bent finger. It has to be snapped back into place soon, or it won’t heal correctly.

  Faria the Red? What a stupid name.

  I hear chanting emanating from inside the igloo. Some sort of strange guttural language I’ve never heard before, if it is indeed a language at all.

  What’s he doing?

  I clamp my jaw shut as I grab my finger. One, two, three. I snap it back straight. Nerves shoot electric fire down my arm. I pound my head against the wall of the igloo. I feel better after the initial flare passes. I already feel the bones beginning to reset of their own accord. The finger might even be better within a few hours thanks to the spypsy’s bone grafts. I close my eyes and drift off to sleep, not knowing if my friend will live or die.

  CHAPTER 17

  SOLO

  I’m awoken by the scraping of knees on ice. I stand in time to see the dark-skinned healer crawl from the igloo. “The worst is past,” he says. “Return here at the end of the workday and you can take your friend back to his camp.”

  “The workday?”

  An alarm reverberates throughout the cavern. Guards enter from a tunnel that leads to the lower levels. They fan out through the village as the prisoners awaken.

  “Give me your finger,” Faria commands. “You’ll be needing it in the mines.”

  “Not necessary,” I reply coldly.

  His hand whips out faster than lightning. He grasps my wrist with incredible strength. “This finger has been reset. It’s almost completely healed. How?” His milky-white eyes narrow.

  I yank my hand back. “You have your secrets. I have mine.”

  “Yesterday, when you fought, you were protecting your ribs. My eyes may not function, but I still see in other ways. And now . . .” His fingers jab into my sides. I wince because I’m still tender. “No longer broken, I see.” He scowls.

  “I have to get back.” I want to end this discussion.

  “Report to your foreman for the day’s assignment.” He crawls back into his igloo.

  I haven’t slept but two hours. I’ve eaten almost nothing for over a day. My stomach growls, my head feels light. I jog toward Picker territory. I arrive just in time to see the gang falling into line. I find a place behind the stocky man, Carrick.

  “Where are we going?” I whisper.

  “Quiet, fish!” someone shouts.

  “I haven’t eaten anything,” I say, realizing I sound whiny.

  Carrick shakes his head. “Perhaps you shouldn’t have spent the night helping an enemy. You dumb piece of—”

  “Quiet back there!” Shank yells from the front.

  We all load into a train, similar to the Banshee Rail, only smaller, packing ourselves inside the cars as the sonic engine hums. The train chugs into the darkness of a tunnel. Down, down into the caverns we go for what seems forever. Finally, the train doors slide open, and we disembark into the grime and filth of an underground mining tunnel. The cacophony of machinery echoes everywhere. I barely hear Shank as he commands the men to move deeper into a tributary off the main tunnel. We pass a station marked “Dungeon Thirteen,” where each member of the gang is issued a helmet with a fireglobe, a harness, and a sonic drill from a locker. Shank opens it via a DNA identification lock.

  Only foremen have access to the tools, I note.

  We hook our harnesses onto a massive arterial cable that has been bolted to the cavern wall. I’m told it’s the Recon Gang’s job to scout the caverns and set these cables so we may move into the depths. I spend my first day in darkness with only the dim light of my helmet to illuminate the labors. I hang on a vertical cliff face picking and drilling the wall, carving rock from ore. T
hat’s what Pickers do, apparently. Chunks of debris fall somewhere below for the Sifter Gang to separate ore from rock. The Haulers, the biggest and strongest of us, oversee the delivery of the material to the smelter station, where it’s further refined for transport back to the upper cavern, from there through the shaft to the surface, and then picked up by a sondi for transport to Meridian.

  Phaestion said our planet has little to trade, but it was House Julii who owned the largest fleet among the Pantheon and monopolized what little there was before the Fracture Point shifted. Since my father transformed the Wendigo from prison to labor camp, he has further advanced its production through a bargain with off-worlders. House Wusong-Leontes will use the metals mined here to craft rockets. Phaestion said that my father planned to save our people through becoming traders somehow. Perhaps Tao does not have significant resources of its own, but with a fleet of ships, her people could ferry the goods of other worlds. Such a plan, if successful, could change the dynamic of the Pantheon and the fabric of our culture. I think this is what Phaestion fears the most.

  I have only these musings along with hatred and self-loathing in these long hours that first day. I think on what led me here.

  Why didn’t Edric try to marry Lavinia or Phoebe to Phaestion instead of me to Miranda Wusong? Perhaps it’s not an either-or proposition, rather an “and.” Why not choose to ally with a powerful rival as well as the imperial line? Maybe the choice wasn’t his. Maybe the enmity is from the other side?

  My mind flashes back to the day Phaestion arrived on Bone, the day he showed me his siren swords. They were made for my brother, Augustus, he had told me. Augustus had died in the Combat. Who would have been strong enough to fell the brother of Phaestion Julii? The picture suddenly seems clearer.

  Edric may have been spurned for his low birth or for having killed the Julii heir. Then didn’t Phaestion try to turn Edric’s own sons against him by indoctrinating them as Companions? My father allowed this. Why? Perhaps he thought that if I died or turned it might be easier to rid himself of me. Then again, Edgaard was also a companion. Perhaps Edric thought that we might turn Phaestion just as well as he could turn us? Vendetta is a funny thing, I marvel.

  I ache from exertion and stop for a moment to shout to the Picker on the line next to me to ask whether we stop for lunch.

  “We don’t break, fish.”

  How do they expect us to stay alive without food? I wonder.

  We work hour upon hour. Finally, the arterial cable is yanked at the end of an eight-hour cycle, our signal to return to the upper caverns. We give up our harnesses, helmets, picks, and drills. We load back onto the train, which returns us to the firelight and cold of the cavern. My body no longer throbs from injury, but from sheer muscle exhaustion. I follow the line of Pickers through the village. I head for the Ration Bar, where the Foodies hand out food packs to inmates. I need sustenance, I need sleep, but I remember my friend still in the care of Faria. I secretly grab an extra pack from the counter and break away from the lines.

  Toshi is waiting for me outside Faria’s hut when I arrive. He stands. I see that he can’t put much weight on his leg, but otherwise looks fine.

  “Edmon! You made it.” He smiles.

  After the ordeal of the last forty-eight hours, it feels like there’s finally some bit of peace that’s taken hold when I see his face.

  “Toshi! You okay?” I feel ready to collapse myself.

  “Thanks to you. And to the old shaman.” He uses the island word for medicine man. Faria is indeed a scary son of a bitch medicine man.

  “What’s wrong?” Toshi asks.

  “Hungry, tired, freezing, in prison. By the twisted star, what isn’t wrong with me?” I laugh, the kind of laugh that’s so bone weary, I no longer can control it. “I brought you this.” I hold up the food pack. We lean on each other and trudge through the village, a pair of friendless wretches. At least we have each other.

  “So how was your day, dear?” he asks.

  “Hanging in utter darkness. Picking all day at rocks. Who could ask for more?”

  Toshi laughs, too. Then we walk in silence. He’s been brought back to life from the brink of death. It’s nigh a miracle.

  “How did he do it, Toshi?” I ask. “You were almost dead when I brought you in. You seem almost good as new.”

  Toshi shrugs. “Truth is, I don’t know. I was unconscious. The moments I came to . . . it’s like the whole thing was a bad dream. Distant.” He looks off. “Something with his hands, though. I remember that much: his hands.”

  He looks at me again and laughs. “Important thing is I’m better, and you need to eat more.”

  I can’t argue. We walk back to the Ration Bar and grab trays from a stack, hoping they won’t notice that I already stole an extra pack earlier. A round man with a shaved head behind the counter grins. “Enjoy, Leontes. I picked your bags especial.”

  “Thanks,” I reply coldly as he slaps a mud-caked pack onto my tray. Aside from the grime, I wonder if the food’s been pissed in, too.

  Toshi and I find a table. “I have a feeling this won’t taste too good,” I mutter.

  “Ya think?” he replies. “Does it really matter?”

  “No,” I admit. I’m hungry enough to eat narwhal dung. For all I know, I’m about to. I tear open the packs and dig in. Compressed, tasteless foodstuffs. They are dehydrated rations that time-release in the gut and are supposed to provide a full day’s worth of nutrients. “Modern efficiency!” I exclaim.

  The alarm rings, and the guards gather at their tunnel to return to their barracks. They’re gone and “night” comes to the village of the Wendigo. Toshi leans across the table conspiratorially and whispers, “Edmon, I got to show you something.” He stands and gestures for me to follow.

  “What is it?” I whisper back.

  “Today, after Faria fixed me up, I was able to explore a bit.” I find it hard to believe that he was walking about for too long, but his recovery is pretty stunning. “I think it’ll be useful,” he says.

  He heads toward a tunnel. I follow. “Isn’t this where guards go?” I ask, becoming nervous. I worry my absence will be noticed by my foreman soon.

  “Exactly.” He pulls a small fireglobe from his pocket, shakes it, and lights up the tunnel walls with eerie incandescence. “I found a tributary from the main passage. Looks like it goes down to the planet core.”

  “And?” I ask, looking around warily.

  “If there’s a passage that leads to somewhere they don’t know about, maybe we can get out of here,” he says.

  “You don’t think they’ve thought of that before?” I ask.

  “Don’t know,” he admits. “But maybe we could strike out on our own. We can sneak into the upper caverns for food.”

  “Survive in the freezing cold, living off scraps?” I say disdainfully.

  “They put us here forever,” he argues. “We’re never leaving. At least maybe we can find some freedom. We’ve got to find out. Even if this one’s a dead end, we’ve got to start looking.”

  “You’re right,” I say warily. “If there’s opportunity, we have to take it, but the right way. We don’t know enough about this place yet to escape it. We’d be better to bide our time and learn as much as we can first.”

  The tunnel gets darker, colder. We round the corner down the tributary he indicates. The lights off the main track fade and so does the heat. We walk for what seems like several kilometers in increasing darkness until ahead I make out a faint light as the tributary opens into a small cave. Far from being abandoned, it’s full with people. They stand against the walls on all sides. Bruul Vaarkson, the big bear of a man, is in the center, waiting.

  I turn quickly to make an escape, but the passage is blocked by half a dozen Haulers with ready fists. “Stay behind me, Toshi,” I warn, trying to position myself between him and our attackers. He’s in no condition to fight. Neither am I, for that matter.

  “He’s not the one you should be worr
ying about protecting,” Vaarkson sneers.

  I turn and look him dead in the eye.

  “Oh, you have spirit. I like them with spirit,” Vaarkson goads. “You finished off that tillyfish the other day, and I’d pit your skills man to man against almost anyone in this joint in a fair fight. But this isn’t a fair fight, is it?”

  I ball my fists. “Do what you’re going to do to us, but quit the sweet talk.”

  “Us, is it? Still haven’t figured it out?” The rest of the Haulers shriek like a pack of hyena eels.

  Toshi is also nervously laughing. He places his hands up and slowly backs away from me. I feel the cold knife of betrayal slip in my gut. He knew. This must have been planned before I even took him to Faria’s. Did Faria know? Did they all?

  “I’m sorry, Edmon. They were going to kill me.” He shakes his head.

  “I saved you. Twice.” My voice registers bewilderment more than anger.

  “Now I have to save myself.” He fades into the crowd. I hear him say faintly, “You said you wouldn’t hurt him.”

  “I say a lot of things.” Vaarkson shrugs. “Besides, this isn’t going to be pain, but pleasure.”

  They rush forward. I fight. Punch, kick, and claw. It’s a sea of people. There’s no space to move and nowhere to go. I’m tackled to the floor of the cave and held down. My bodysuit is torn from my back. I feel the bite of the arctic cold against my bare skin. Then he’s on me. Vaarkson. Large, hairy, his breath foul. I say nothing as it happens, clamp my jaw shut and bear the pain. My mind goes somewhere else.

  I see my mother the day of the christening. She defied my father with every breath as he beat her. You will forget what you saw here today, she said.

  I remember Nadia when she pulled me up from falling that day so long ago. They tried to make me forget her, too. I am with you, Little Lord, she whispers in my memory.

  Then another voice whispers. Remember. It’s not my mother’s or Nadia’s. Strangely, it’s the voice of my father. Remember. His anger and his power, like a single intense candle flame of hatred, grow inside me. Remember, and when the time comes, no mercy.