by E. E. Knight
"A little rough around the edges, like everything here, but you seem capable," she said, smiling. She shook each of their hands with a cool, firm grip.
"Ura, Alessa Duvalier and David Valentine are also concerned with the Twisted Cross. Could it be that the evil has been reawakened, like so many others?"
"I fear so. Certainly they have unfurled the old standard. Perhaps they march again."
"What's this, Ryu?" Duvalier said. "When you tasked me with this, you didn't tell me you knew anything."
"I thought it might be coincidence. Many things appear to be different now. Certainly they never used Reapers before."
"Maybe you should start from the beginning." Valentine mined his memory, trying to bring back every detail, every word of the brief encounter he had with a member of the Twisted Cross in Chicago. All he could remember was the unknown man's kill in the grotty Zoo basement, the sight of the gaunt figure's blood-smeared face, the ripped-out throat of that poor condemned girl.
"Come and sit then," Ryu said, leading them to one of the long tables. "Ura, would you care for food or drink? No? David, to start from the beginning would take years. As you should well know, you've learned more of these matters in your youth than many of your elders, even ones who should know better.
"The Twisted Cross go back to the first onslaught, when the Kurians came across the Interworld Tree as the great schism turned to war. On Earth and six other planets, they attacked us without warning. Their first human allies were a group known as the Aryans, originally from the middle of Asia.
"Because of their favored status with the Kur, the Aryans considered themselves superior to other men. The baubles the Kurians gave them made them able to convince others of this, and soon the Aryans led armies that would do the bidding of Kur."
Ura held up her hand. "It is worth remembering that the Kurians failed in their first invasion, and the Aryans' power was broken."
"So what does the Twisted Cross mean?" Valentine asked.
"I do not know," Ryu said. "Some have interpreted that glyph to mean 'life.' As an extreme example, there is no physiological reason that a human couldn't live off vital aura and gain what amounts to immortality. It requires not much more of a Change than the one that you recently experienced, David. Your body already generates and uses vital aura; it is the loss of this in the declining years that causes you to age. It is just a matter of being able to acquire and utilize another's aura."
Valentine took a moment to consider this. Perhaps that was the carrot dangled before humans who betrayed their own species. If offered eternal life, what would his answer be? How different was it, truly, from eating a steak or a slice of ham?
"Alessa, David, do what you can to learn about this new threat. In the mountains of the Eastern seaboard, my sister tells me, we suffered a mysterious loss two summers ago. One day there was a thriving freehold in a guarded valley. Ten thousand of your people. And the next, a wasteland. Last summer we lost all contact with some allies on the Gulf Coast at the Florida peninsula. We fear the Ozarks may be next. I've sent out other teams with the same orders I'm giving you: Find out all you can about this General and those who follow his banner."
"Of course we'll learn what we can," Duvalier responded. "I've got an idea of where to start. But the trail's already cold. We may be back soon."
"You're not ready yet, but then neither am I," Duvalier told Valentine a few days later. "Doesn't matter, though. We're leaving."
The lodge echoed emptily. Aside from Valentine, the lone remaining Cat was Duvalier, and even the other Aspirants had left to join their tutors for the summer. Of course the ubiquitous Welles still lingered, but she was a permanent resident. They busied themselves with last-minute preparations: putting together an assortment of photographs—Welles had a pair of cameras and a darkroom— that could be used on identification papers, collecting blank forms they might need in the Gulag, going over the latest news summaries so they understood conditions in their operational area.
Valentine had grown into his new senses and skills. He handled his sword with the same confidence he once felt in his rifle and parang. He practiced with the gun Bourne sent him—it wasn't any use at all over two hundred yards, but in the rough and tumble of close-quarters action, it would be a deadly asset.
His night vision rivaled that of daytime except at the most extreme distances, and he could play follow-my-leader with Duvalier over a single-strand rope footbridge without thinking twice. As he did it, he concentrated on "quieting his mind," obliterating his higher consciousness as Ryu instructed. He needed no training in moving quietly; his skill at that had earned him the nickname "Ghost" long ago from his Wolf teammates.
Even Duvalier found his ability to move silently a little eerie. He overheard her discussing it with Welles one evening when they assumed he was asleep. Duvalier explained that she was resting against a tree one afternoon and knew he was next to her only when he touched her shoulder.
"Hmmph, maybe it's the Indian blood. He got the hair, anyway."
"His mother was Sioux. Listen, there's more. I read this in his Q-file: he can sense Reapers. It happened on a couple of occasions, and there are witnesses. But only if they're active. He picks up on them when they're moving around, but if they're asleep ... nothing. He can almost locate them with it. It's like their reading of our lifesign, only reversed."
Welles paused, perhaps thinking it through in her mind. "Weird shit. Maybe he's sensitive to the connection they have with their Masters, do you think?"
"Could be. I've heard of people being able to ping off them; never met one, though. I'll feel a lot more comfortable sleeping at night knowing he's right there."
"I bet he could make you a lot more comfortable at night," Welles said with a very uncharacteristic giggle. "Get off, Dix. My interest in him is purely professional." "Mmmmm-hmmmm. Good thing I just fell off a turnip truck, otherwise I might not believe you. I will miss the fresh bread and biscuits, though. He worked that cute ass of his off in the kitchen. Never mind the firewood to last until next spring."
The Hall echoed with the sounds of their packing. Valentine looked up at the glow bulbs, tempted to take one. It would be a useful souvenir.
"Feel free to store your gear here," Duvalier said. "We all do. This is the closest thing to a home you're going to have for a while."
Welles appeared, a bundle tucked under her arm.
"Made this for you, young Ghost. In return for a lot of tasty bread and some great fireside stories. Who ever thought I'd like hearing about Roman emperors and moldy old English plays? Here you go," she said, handing it over. "I can't move around so good anymore, but I still sew like the wind."
"I don't know if I'd call Richard the Third a moldy English play, but you're welcome," he said, taking the folded green cloth. He untied the twine around it and unfolded a long riding overcoat.
"Sorry some of the buttons don't match, but you know how it is. I used wooden pegs at the stress points—they hold up a little better."
Valentine held it up and then tried it on. It was a faded, slate-colored green, reversible to black like Duvalier's natty relic. It hung to just above his ankles, and was split up the back for saddle use, including loops for his legs to go through. There were pockets galore, and a built-in muffler that could strap around his throat and closing heavy collar. A hood hung neatly down the back, cut so skillfully it looked like decoration. "So you weren't taking my measurements for 'statistical reasons' a month ago, huh?"
"Guilty. Keep out of sight, would you, Valentine? It'll keep out the wind, but not bullets. The damn Bears grab all the Reaper cloaks, you know."
"You going to cry or thank her, Val?" Duvalier asked.
"Thanks, Dix. I really appreciate this."
"You'll appreciate it even more the first rainstorm you walk through. Wear it in good health, Ghost."
They opened the heavy front door and stepped out into the morning light. A pair of roan horses browsed amongst the grass and weeds o
f the front lawn. As Ryu followed the Cats out the door, the horses raised their heads and nickered.
"A farewell gift," Ryu explained. "This pair is out of a very wily herd of wild horses that runs the mountains. I called and they came."
"They won't do us much good, then," Valentine said. He had spent some time training wild horses to pull timber in Minnesota. "It'll take days to break them properly."
Ryu patted Valentine on me shoulder. "That will not be necessary, David. I imprinted the two of you on them, if that is the proper expression. They should take to you quite readily. Try it."
The horses, as if listening to Ryu's words, walked up to the pair.
"I'll go grab some oats out of the kitchen," Dix said. "That'll last you until you reach a border fort for supplies."
Valentine looked at the mare a trifle dubiously, but she looked calmly back at Valentine from her white-freckled face as if she had known him her whole life. She gave the collar of his new overcoat an experimental nibble. He grabbed a handful of mane and slipped onto the horse's bare back. He pressed against the horse's side with his calf, and it sidestepped to face Ryu and his ethereal companion.
"We have some saddles and blankets in the outside shed, do we not?" Ryu asked.
Duvalier looked over at the little outbuilding next to the smokehouse. "Yes, I think we can rig something up. Thank you, sir—this means a lot to us."
Ryu turned his piercing eyes to Valentine. "Seventy-one days ago, you accused us of using you. At times I think my people take you humans for granted. We share the same war, but you do most of the dying. Some hold that if we do too much for you, you will become dependent on us and cease growing. I sympathize with that belief, but arguments over not interfering with a civilization become moot when the Kurians have already reordered your world to suit their purposes. So if I can help my children with a simple trick, I do it.
"Speaking of simple tricks, I have one for you, David. A small gift," he said, holding out his hand. In it a tiny, triangular glow bulb glimmered faintly in the daylight. " 'May it be a light to guide you in dark places, when all others lights go out,' " he said. Or did he? The quotation seemed to drop into Valentine's brain, a windfall from the abundant orchard of his reading, without benefit of the Lifeweaver's lips moving.
"You know how to charge it, I believe," he said, again speaking with his voice.
"Leave it in the light," Valentine said, taking the little pyramid-shaped object.
"In the Old Days, we had ones that generated heat, as well, which would be far more useful. But that Art, like so many others, is lost to us in the here and now."
Ryu and Ura exchanged a long look, making Valentine wonder if in that time they shared the mental equivalent of an evening's discussion.
"Alessa, follow your spirit when your mind falters. David, if you keep an open mind, you will find friends un-looked for," Ryu said. He drifted up off the ground, touching their foreheads, first Duvalier's and then his, with his fingertips and spreading his arms before them as if in benediction.
"Go, the two of you," Ura added, imitating the gesture. "Turn away this old evil, and in doing so, change evil fate into good fortune for our Cause."
While you are at it, find King Solomon's mines and a splinter of the True Cross, the contrarian part of Valentine's mind added. He looked over at Duvalier, standing next to her newly appointed horse with a rapt expression on her face. She looked hypnotized. Did she know more than he, or was she just more gullible? Evidence of the Lifeweavers' special abilities stood quietly between his legs at that moment, or were the magically appearing horses some kind of elaborate put-on?
He could not argue with his enhanced senses, from vision to balance. He could spend most of the day running, but not be exhausted. There was no question that they had awakened something inside him, but did they create it, or just ring the alarm clock?
Duvalier and Valentine bowed in thanks and left their horses to see if they could find bridle and saddle in the jumble of odds and ends housed in the outbuilding.
Valentine looked at the Hall one more time. He remembered something his mother used to tell him: There are two kinds of people in the world—those who look back and those who look forward. She also said that most people in their youth look forward, and a sign of advancing age was looking back. Always look forward, David, she'd told him.
Being atop fresh horses and under the summer sun felt fine. The Kurian Zone was far away; if it were not for the July humidity, the day would have been ideal. After an easy stretch to warm them to travel again, the well-shaded old highways of the Ozarks guided them back up to the Missouri borderlands in a second hard day's ride. Duvalier showed her usual flair for finding discreet shelter in a pre-Overthrow ruin.
Valentine always bedded down in the old homes and businesses with a certain amount of trepidation. He would sometimes find an old weather-stained family picture and stare at the carefully combed and braided hair on the children and wonder what the fate of this or that family member was. The Ravies plague that swept the world in 2022 took the majority; war and upheaval claimed the rest. He had seen enough death at close hand to wonder how any of the old-timers had come through it with sanity intact. The population in the first years of the Kurian rule was thought to be somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of its pre-2022 height, with the urban areas suffering the worst losses. Valentine once passed through the nuclear blast site in Little Rock on a trip up the Arkansas River, where nature had returned but not man. Trees now grew amongst the naked girders and piles of rubble, but people shunned the site as if it lay under a curse.
"What's on the agenda for tomorrow?" Valentine asked after they had seen to the horses.
"We're a team now, Valentine," she said, lugging her saddle indoors. "We both share the decisions. You're sensible enough."
"That sounded an awful lot like a compliment."
"You cut me off before I could say 'most of the time.' I was thinking we should stop tomorrow at Fort Springfield. That's the last stop before we hit no-man's-land. That old man from the Oklahoma City rail yard, he said the 'Nazis' traveled by train, right?"
"Yes. He also mentioned that new lines were going in west of here."
She set down the saddle and dug out a tin of some kind of tallow from her pack. She worked the tallow into a rag and then used the rag to clean the summer dust off the saddle. Valentine began to put some dinner together using the fresh food they brought with them from Ryu's Hall. The best of the summer vegetables had come in, and he began to peel and pare into a pot of chicken stock.
"There's three sides to a job, Valentine," she said, drawing a triangle in the dirt. She put three letters at the corners. "Fast, safe, and right. You get to pick any two when you're out in the KZ. You can do something fast and right, but you sacrifice safe. Or safe and right, but you won't get it done fast."
"Then there's fast and safe."
"That's how most Cats operate. In and out quick. Me, I like to live around my objective for a while. Then when it comes time to act, I know what I'm doing. Your lead from the old nutcase is the only trail we have, at least in this part of the country. I'd just as soon not go stumbling around in the Smoky Mountains, where I don't know anybody."
"Then you know people in the plains?"
"How does that old song go? 7 got friends in low places...' Sure, Valentine, not everyone in the Gulag is a Quisling."
Valentine covered the little pot hanging over the fire burning in an old stainless-steel sink they had propped up on two cinder blocks.
Duvalier unfolded a map Of the Old United States. "We know the General moves by train, right? They didn't raid into the Free Territory, which I kind of suspected they might do. Could be he doesn't have the muscle for that job yet. They were heading north out of Oklahoma City. The Kur don't have a reliable east-west rail line south of Iowa and Nebraska—your old buddies the Wolves raise too much hell between Kansas City and St. Louis—they don't even try to keep that line repaired anymore. In Kansas or
Nebraska, they could have turned west, to hit Denver or one of the Freeholds in the Rockies. I can't believe they turned back east. Why come west in the first place?"
Valentine looked at the map. "North out of Oklahoma, they might have turned west at Wichita, Junction City, or maybe even Lincoln. Lincoln seems like a long shot, but if I were trying to recruit, Iowa might be the place to do it. It sounded like a long time ago, there was a pretty big army under that Twisted Cross banner. Maybe they're trying to do the same thing again. A lot of loyal Quislings have land in Iowa granted to them in exchange for services rendered. We used to draw a two-hundred-mile circle around Des Moines and call it Brass Ringland. I imagine these Quislings are raising families. Could be they want some sons and daughters to join up."
Duvalier looked at the map for a moment and thought. "Funny, I'm just not picturing these guys as leaders of a huge army. They seem secretive, more like a tight elite unit. In a way, if they had a huge army, it would be better for us. We could track—hell, even infiltrate. I feel like they're more the Kur's answer to our Bears: small teams of very serious badasses who crack nuts the Kur don't want to risk their own Reapers on."
"Reaper mercenaries? Okay, you've seen Reapers, I've seen men. Maybe it's their version of a tag team. The men guard the Reapers when they sleep away the day, and the Reapers do the killing at night."
"That system's in place already, Valentine."
"Perhaps they're just perfecting it."
"I still heard Reapers talking on the hill where we met. That means they weren't being operated by the same Master."
A Kurian Lord animated his Reapers through a psychic bond, the same bond that fed him the vital aura of humans killed by the Reaper.
Nothing made sense to Valentine. "How about if a group of Kurian Lords decided to spread the risk in destroying common enemies. They each contribute one Reaper, a flying strike force to .. . No ... damn, that makes no sense. A Kurian's hold gets weaker the farther the Reaper is from him."
