Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall

by Charles Ingrid

  He'd his own opinions but wanted them confirmed.

  "What are you thinking, Thomas?" asked Lady sharply.

  "Nothing that the majority of us aren't thinking already. Drakkar's heroism is much appreciated but a little suspect." He pulled the nester lance out of the dirt. An aura of pain and death came with it. The scalps were still fresh. Drops of gore had puddled on the ground.

  "I'll take that," Lady said, reaching for it. "You'll want to look at it later.''

  He let her take it, though Alma shrank away from it. She gave him that two-color look as plain as any message. They had woman things to talk over and wanted their privacy. Thomas smiled ruefully and left.

  The room had polarized into factions by the time he entered the manor. The festive atmosphere of the morning was gone, replaced by weary fire fighters and Countians who were hungry and tired. Drakkar appeared not to notice the division as he worked the room, shaking hands formally. He had an eye for the young ladies shuffling forward to meet him, Thomas noted. Trouble, and more trouble.

  He saw Shankar and hooked the ambassador. "Why, Sir Thomas," the man said, his voice too soft and oily. "What can I do for you?"

  "You can tell your young chieftain to get back on his horse and go back to the Mojave or our alliance won't be worth a damn. I'm not going to let him splinter my people."

  The ambassador sighed sharply. "It wouldn't work," he said, dropping all pretense. Thomas was surprised to see overt unhappiness written all over Shankar. "Drakkar passed me this."

  He handed a tidy scroll to Thomas. It was addressed to him in the finely written hand of Micah, Denethan's elderly scribe. Micah had recovered from his illness enough, apparently, to resume some of his duties for De-nethan. The seal had been broken and it was obvious Shankar had read it first.

  Thomas let his eyebrows go up and looked at Shankar. The ambassador merely shrugged. "Read it," he said.

  My dear Thomas. Into your capable hands I send my son Drakkar as a visible token of the alliance between ourselves. I ask that you look as deeply for the humanity within him as you have looked in all of us. My reign here is being challenged and it is not safe for Drakkar to remain with me. The nesters have acquired leadership. I have my suspicions as to who or what provides it and will inform you as soon as I've confirmed it. In the meantime, know that our treaty has opened a rift among my people and that my rule is an uneasy one. I have sent Shankar an antidote for the poison in Drakkar's spurs. He has been named for drago or draco, in Latin, the dragon. Watch your back. D.

  A chill went down his back. Thomas let the scroll snap shut in his hands. "Antidote?" he said.

  "The boy has been known to duel. The, ah, antidote is fairly effective."

  "Shit."

  The Mojavan ambassador looked visibly startled. "Pardon?"

  "You heard me. All I need is to be up to my ass in politicking and intrigue." The scars on his wrist and on his brow itched. He looked across the vast room of the manor as the French doors were thrown open and the scent of dinner flooded in. Diners began drifting outside where tables had been set up on the lawn scarred by the fighting of the afternoon. The smell of roast pork wafted their way. It reminded him that it had been a long day, and he was achingly hungry. "Let's eat, Shankar."

  The ambassador bowed. "A worthy idea. A hot meal changes the perspective of many problems."

  Thomas had already tucked away a plateful when Lady brought Alma and seated her at the end of his table. The girl had bathed and changed clothes. Now she was wearing a light blue shirt and brown and blue skirt that had undoubtedly been borrowed from the healer, for it was cinched up tightly at the waist. The Protector also had a habit of wearing colors that echoed her eyes.

  Thomas caught her gaze and raised an inquiring eyebrow. Lady merely returned an enigmatic look that meant nothing and everything. She filled her plate and he noticed that she watched Drakkar closely without seeming to.

  Alma was quiet as she passed her plate for steaming chunks of pit-roasted meat. Drakkar, seated three chairs down on Thomas' left, did not miss the appearance of the young lady he'd rescued.

  He paused, fork halfway to his mouth. "Feeling better?"

  She snatched her plate back and eyed it intently. "Yes," she said quietly. "Much. And thank you."

  "It was chance, but a fortunate one." Drakkar took his bite. He had good teeth.

  A commotion rose on the patio, the stomping and shuffling of booted feet. Thomas turned, one hand going to his collar, fingertips brushing his throwing star. By torchlight, he could see a dusty, ragged band of troopers and riders. Sunset had just bled out of the sky, a purple haze settling over the house and lawns, but he knew Countians when he saw them. A tall man with white-blond hair led them, and his tiredness and worry was etched deeply in his face.

  "It's Stefan," Alma said, pushing away from the table and getting to her feet.

  Thomas dropped his hand from his weapons. He noted that two or three of the mappers had accompanied Stefan and the militia. They all looked as if they'd been beaten with a stick. The mappers, a generation of surveyors and cartographers hand-trained and inspired by Charles Warden, were all boys fast approaching adulthood. Theirs was a profession that, twenty years ago, no one could have been spared to follow.

  The Russian-born Countian approached the table. "Sir Thomas," he said, and his throat sounded as if caked with dust. He cleared it and tried again. "You found lhem." His eyes avoided Alma, but he clearly knew she stood waiting for him.

  "No," Blade answered, "but they've been brought back. Were you decoyed?"

  "Yes and very successfully, too, I'm afraid. We lost three raiders to booby traps. They took us all the way down to the Fire Ring. We never saw them, but they led us by the nose . . . until we caught up with them." He left unsaid what had happened then, but Blade rejoiced at the silent implication. Stefan took off his hat and turned it in his hands, examining the brim closely. He looked up, pale blue eyes avoiding Alma. "They came to kill as many of us as they could."

  "I know. You did well."

  Governor Irlene spoke up. "That they did. Clean up and get some dinner before it gets cold."

  Alma said, "I've saved you a plate, Stefan."

  He looked at her then. "That won't be necessary," he said, turned on his heels, and followed the other boys down to the bathhouse.

  Alma dropped back into her chair. She stared down at her plate.

  Lady slid a hand over hers and squeezed gently.

  Thomas saw that Drakkar, without staring, had missed nothing, despite the chatter of diners between them.

  "Damn," he muttered to himself. He thought Shankar, next to him, made a kind of hissing noise deep in his throat.

  A full moon rode the sky that night. The stars of Indian summer peppered the cloudless bowl. The only veil pulled over the silvery disk was an occasional sputter of smoke from the avenue of torches upon the lawn. The tables had been cleared and taken down. Blankets replaced chairs. Over the murmur of talking, the only loud noises were clinks of glasses or long-necked beers.

  A hedge of night-blooming jasmine marked the slope of the manor house off from that of the barracks. Against its backdrop, Lady Nolan solemnly waited to swear in and name the candidates for Protector. A dusky-skinned boy stepped forward to meet her. His eyes shone in the torchlight.

  "I am Stanhope Nolan," he said, declaring his training and his Talent with the choosing of his last name. Excitement greeted his opening statement. Healers were rare and needed. Counties would be vying for his permanent assignment, but Stanhope had a year on the road facing him before he would be allowed to pledge his allegiance to any one county.

  Lady took his hand and they faced the Countians, but Thomas, sprawled on the grass, jaw propped one one elbow, listened without hearing. His thoughts warred with his fatigue. There was a changing of the guards of sorts, as Lady and Stanhope left the center of attention, replaced by Franklin with the next four.

  She left Stanhope's side, the boy's eyes still
shining, and joined him. The hand she gave him to hold was chilled. He sat up. He ground the bottle of beer into a clump of grass to steady it, so he could cover her hand with both of his.

  She said nothing and although he wanted to ask her why she had done what she had done with Stanhope during the testing, he could not. If she said that she despised him because he was the executioner, what would he do then? He would lose her for good. Better to have her now and wonder when she would leave, than to have already lost her. The breeze shifted slightly, bringing the scent of the burned out barn with it.

  His thoughts chilled him then. He realized that his own musings were already leading him away from her. It was him leaving her rather than the other way around.

  She half-turned to him, her lips parting gently as if to say something, when Stefan dropped down on the lawn behind them. He smelled sharply of horses, sweat, and lye soap. Lady closed her mouth firmly, no longer about to say what she had been about to.

  "It's time," the young man said, without preamble. He was not good-looking in the way that Drakkar was. His features were too bony, eyes a little too small, worry lines already cutting into his lean features. He kept his light hair cut short, emphasizing the rawboned nature of his face. "I want to take a mapping expedition out, Thomas." He should be addressing a mayor or a governor, not the executioner, but Blade knew well why he came to him first.

  Lady looked daggers at him, though the night shadowed her face.

  Thomas let go of her hand. He sat up and crossed his legs nester-style. "You have a wife," he responded mildly.

  "I also have a dream," Stefan answered. "And now's the time to follow it before I have responsibilities to keep me from it. Alma's young, we have no children—" He stopped, expressionlessly.

  "There are other surveyors."

  His voice took an edge. "I'm one of the oldest. I've been with you as far as the College Vaults, and we need to map beyond. There must be other enclaves, other survivors, unless we're isolated geographically. We need to know and we're ready to volunteer.''

  Thomas scratched at an invisible patch of dirt on the knee of his jeans. "You're talking about a lifetime vocation,"

  "Done a little bit at a time. A job I can pass down to my son." Stefan's voice choked up.

  If the nesters united, they could effectively wall off any avenues to outside exploration. The mapmakers needed to go now before those passes were closed by warfare. He could not argue with the logic of Stefan's timing. And someone like Thomas needed to go with the mappers, to assess what was happening with the nester clans. He was the only authority on nesters he knew.

  He stirred.

  Lady must have sensed his thoughts. "No!" she said urgently.

  "He's right," Thomas told her.

  "No. No, Stefan, don't do this. Don't tear yourself away from Alma. She was terrified today."

  The young man met her gaze unflinchingly. "You don't want me to leave," he said, "because you think I'm genetically pure. Well, I'm not. I'm probably sterile. This is the only way I can leave my mark on the Seven Counties. At least give me this."

  "It's not your failure alone," Lady argued. "It takes two. Alma's very young. She began maturing late . . . she—"

  "She's better off without me!" Stefan interrupted. He grabbed Thomas' arm. "Let us go. Take us as far as the Vaults and let us go. Charlie trained us for this. It was your dream once, too."

  Damn the boy. Damn the boy for remembering too well all the years he'd worked with him. He'd taught Stefan how to shoot, to track. How to follow the lay of the land.

  Thomas stood. He had not wished to interrupt the ceremonies, but he and Stefan had a lot to talk about, and it was better done privately. "Where's the lance?" he asked of Lady.

  She would not look up. "In Charlie's den."

  "Come with me," he told Stefan. He wanted another look at the war lance. If the Dean of the College Vaults was still alive, and if the dean was behind the nester raid, it was certain he'd sent Thomas a challenge. He wanted to be sure he read it aright before he answered it.

  Chapter 9

  Return to Fall, 2283

  He'd always been a big man. He remembered that, as well as seeing the fact for himself when he reviewed the records. Now he was tall, but emaciated, his fleshy bulk gone to stickpin arms and legs. Living among the nesters would not flesh him out again, but he'd begun to get his strength back in wiry muscles. He owed the clans his life, he supposed, if living among the ruins could be considered a life.

  He approached his past through the broken foothills which he had known as the San Gabriel Mountains because the nester clan which had taken him in camped by the San Gabriel Reservoir. There had been clans living in the shadow of the Vaults themselves, but he had ordered them destroyed for the vermin they were. It had been weeks before this clan had found him and taken him in.

  They were still vermin, but this time they were useful vermin.

  He rode horseback, and the inside of his thighs chafed horribly and the bone of his butt ached with every bouncing step the horse took. The animal was ewe-necked and its spine stuck up like a range of volcanic rock even through the crude saddle, but it was better than walking. A clansman, the only one he could convince to come with him, trotted obediently behind him and on a lead behind the nester were two burros. The dean needed Ketchum far more than the nester needed him, though he would never let the beastman know that. Without him, the dean doubted he could find the encampment again or deal with the recalcitrant little Nazarene donkeys.

  Every time he saw the burros, he thought of the wild ones whod run the China Lake military base and how much trouble thered been every time the herds had to be thinned down. This was a memory ingrained in his first self, not an experience of this body, but accessible to him anyway. Animal rights people would protest, the military forces would embarrass themselves, the hunters would line up in their four-wheelers to go shooting along the desert flats—who would have thought, a couple of hundred years later, the burros would survive and the military would be dead.

  Not him. He would not have bet on it.

  He would never have bet he could have been turned out of the Vaults, either.

  His horse stumbled on the jagged, brown stalks of grass that framed the dry hills. He reined it to a stop, stood in the saddle stirrups to take his weight off his butt, and the nester rode up beside him.

  The hill was still scarred with the battle fought here. The explosion had collapsed the far side of the mountain in on itself, but here was where the funeral pyres had been stacked, and great mounds of ash and bone littered the meadow. It had only been a few months and with no rain over the summer, the green was yet to come. It would be well fed when it did come.

  The nester's round brown eyes were wide with awe. "Dean," he said. "The mountain is dead."

  "This part of it is. We go around to the base of the hill along the creek bed."

  "Ah," said Ketchum. "You have a second hole there." He spoke in the manner of a tracker used to the ways of wily animals.

  "Indeed I do." He stared at the begrimed and hair-matted man until the tracker looked away, afraid to meet his eyes. The dean felt a surge of triumph at that. I am Mowgli, he thought, staring down the wild animals. I am man and he is not. He let the pleasure of the domination flood him for a moment. He had not been able to convince anyone else to accompany him—his status with the clan was uncertain, but it would not be after his return from the Vaults. Deposed from the Vaults he might have been, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man was king. There was science enough buried in the underground labs to keep him immortal and make him king over any subjects. And when he was done with the nester clans, the Seven Counties would pay for destroying the last stronghold of modern man.

  He'd see to it personally.

  He settled back in the saddle and turned his horse downslope. Ketchum made a chirping noise to his mount and dropped back into place obediently, the two fractious burros lingering behind him.

  The self
-destructive devices had done an excellent job, he discovered. Belly down like a snake he crawled back into the dubious womb which had given him birth and rebirth. The escape tunnel had partially collapsed on itself after he'd gotten through. It gave the dean a certain amount of satisfaction to know that his new leaner self was gaining ground where he could not possibly have gone before. The long hot summer of lean rations had done him a favor. The light on his headgear flickered once, but he did not falter as he inched forward through the soft dirt until he found the plasticomb walls of the tunnel again.

  Ketchum would not enter with him, though he held the far end of a rope that the dean untangled from his belt as he crawled forward. The man was abominably suspicious, constantly praying to the Shastra, some shaggy-haired beast he claimed watched over them. The dean had identified vague ursine and canine genes in the totems he'd been allowed to see. He'd been told it was the Shastra that had brought nester hunters across his path to save him from dying. He remembered no such creature and had been an agnostic throughout his various incarnations. But the backing of such a dubious demigod had served to give him personal magic and kept Ketchum at bay. That was just as well, for the dean wanted whatever magics he salvaged from the Vaults to be his and his alone though he doubted the stunted intelligence of the man would be able to comprehend much of what he would have seen in the ruins. Still, the dean coveted these ruins as his and his alone, the salvage as his legacy. The closed community of hundreds had died, silently, at his behest. He had intended it that way and he wanted it kept that way.

  He reached an interior, wall of the Vaults. Taking the rope off his waist, he anchored it on the open bulkhead. He stood, knees cracking as he did so, back still cramped because he could not stand up completely and had to walk hunched over. His light picked out the signs and international symbols, but he knew where he was. He had spent several lifetimes here. He scrounged through labs, picking through tools and utensils that were irreplaceable. He took his time, unworried whether Ketchum survived outside.

  He finally found the utero chambers and dropped the makeshift packs he'd made and stuffed with salvage, uttering a cry of dismay.