The ghost road could, as nearly as he could tell, telescope or fold time and distance. But to travel it leeched his own time—his life's span and energy. He didn't know how to anchor it or how to force it in any particular direction. But he did know that primal forces, very basic ones, could intersect violently with it. Wolfrats, coyotes, even sharks had run it. Traveling it in the Vaults had very nearly trapped his life force inside solid rock. And traveling it years ago had still not saved Charles and Ronnie or even their daughter Jennifer.
He would not be too late this time.
He ran into a void that was like running into a night sky. He felt as though he paced uphill, yet there was only above and below. The firmament ahead of him was star-struck, pinpoints of brilliant fire that shot away from him and faded even as he ran after them. The cables stretched ahead of him like a rope bridge across eternity.
He ran.
* * *
He ran until the breath sucked from his lungs couldn't be sucked back in. Until he had a stitch in his rib cage as bad as any he'd ever experienced. Until the sweat flowing off his face obscured his sight. He plowed to a halt and bowed over, his hands on his knees, gasping.
Finally, when he had breath enough, he said, "God.' I must smell like a horse. I sound like one." He straightened slowly. His lungs wheezed and he coughed once or twice.
He could have been running for half a day or for two. The road was like that. He couldn't keep running forever.
He put a hand on the silver and sable strand pulling away from it. A shock ran through him. He let go of the wire with a grunt as if Lady had kicked him in the gut. He stood and rubbed the flat of his stomach.
There was a sound in the void. He turned, baffled by his bad ear, casting to see if he could tell what it was and where it had come from. It was . . . nothing and yet, he could hear it ... a vibration, a belling beyond his sensory capacity, a somethingness beyond his perception. The darkness around him welled and buckled. His legs went out from under him as whatever it was roiled about him, under him, through him (a thousand spears of ice), left him shivering and shuddering on the pathway, on hands and knees. Gone.
What had it been?
A shadow, vast and energetic, among shadows. He grasped for Lady's cable, afraid he'd seen death. His fingers met emptiness.
The strands were gone.
Thomas roared, "Where the hell are you?"
The void swallowed up his despair as if it had never been.
Dakin said, "He wants you to do what?"
"Make war on the mutant society down here that he calls the Seven Counties. He's got cause. I've seen the damage they did to the installation called the College Vaults. A direct hit wouldn't have touched the facility, but they got in by subterfuge and blew it up from the inside," Marshall replied. The shuttle com room had been cleared but for the two of them. The others had tumbled exhausted into their cots and hammocks. Dusty hung onto his elbow. A day riding the hover had left her skin feeling dry and tight, grit permanently wedged between her teeth, and a keen desire to throttle Klegg and his partner.
Also with an aching hole through her heart and soul. All that could have been left of her sister was gone, blasted away in the aftermath of the disasters. The dean had been vague about what had happened—ensconced below, he probably had not been aware of everything that had happened. A meteor hit, even a glancing blow, had left an immense crater in what had been the greater L.A. basin. Earthquakes and toxic pollution, riots and the inability to raise technology again to deal with the after effects had destroyed the country she'd known.
The enviros had been ecstatic examining the path of destruction, mapping out pools of gas, radioactivity, toxicity, even botulism. They had hung from their straps on the hovercraft as it skimmed over the area, collecting info and readings by the seat of their pants. To their morbid fascination, the dean had replied only, "They say the quickest way to kill a man here is to take him In-City.''
His flat, laconic acceptance of the hover helped to convince Marshall and Dusty that he was what he said he was—a single man of many lives. But that did not convince her he was entirely sane.
And trapped within her thoughts was that other voice. Indubitably masculine and powerful, she found it intrusive and yet . . . her own thoughts incredibly alone when she could not hear it. Was it the dean, product of a civilization forty years more advanced than the one she remembered? He watched her with a predatory keenness that disturbed her. She knew that Marshall would never have bowed to his demands alone, even under siege from the hundreds of warriors who had faced them in the morning. They could simply have shut up the shuttle and stayed aboard until the demands of water and food had driven the nation away.
But it was the witnesses they had borne with them that Marshall had listened to that day. They had lined up man by man to speak to Marshall. They had told of generations of being outcast, shunned, held to a substandard of living by water rationing. They bore on them marks of extra limbs, eyes, gills, privation, famine, and pestilence. And these were only the men. The women and children had been left in the safety of camp.
A voice droned into her musings. She looked up at the screen. Dakin's half-irritated, half-amused glance was fixed on her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm dead on my feet."
"And I could have sworn those were gears I saw churning."
She gave a rueful smile. "I don't necessarily agree with Marshall, sir," she returned.
"About what?"
"About anything. This . . . dean's . . . story. He crawls out of the ruins of this underground repository and the nesters take him in and heal him. Once healed, he looks around and sees the terrible conditions under which they've been forced to live and decides to liberate them? He's as old as I am, basically. Why did it take him two hundred and fifty years to decide to help his fellow man? I think he's out for somebody's ass and needs an army to help him collect it."
Marshall cleared his throat as Sun's face split into an open grin. Dusty felt her face grow warm. The Challenger commander answered, "Plain speaking, as always."
She shrugged. "I don't trust him."
Marshall rumbled, "I'm not sure of my stance, either, Commander, except that we can't afford to dismiss him. He has the loyalty of a significant amount of manpower— and we need to be able to explore this area freely.''
"I agree. How many is significant?"
"We scanned maybe three hundred men. Add women and children and those nesters the dean says are still out-land, double it—maybe two thousand."
The commander's face went smooth. "Two thousand in an area that once supported millions prosperously."
"I understand the Seven Counties numbers closer to five thousand."
"Still a drop in the sea of humanity." Dakin appeared to sigh though she could not hear him. ' 'Marshall, I agree with your assessment. We can't afford to antagonize this man even if we're of dubious feelings about him. We're extremely vulnerable away from the shuttle."
"I hear that one," Marshall countered. He scratched the corner of a soft brow. "I don't want to take sides in a war to wipe out whatever is left."
Dakin's image began to blue as he closed down transmission. "Unfortunately," the commander's sad voice lingered, "we may not have much choice if they're committed to warring upon us."
The dean sat cross-legged upon the fragrant stuffed pillows of his tent. Ketchum hunkered down in the dirt and dried grass across from him. Dinner had been cleared. Most of the nation had been sent back to their campgrounds. The shuttle and its occupants had shut themselves up for the night. Both were intent upon the pipes in their hand. After the puffs of blue-gray smoke filtered away gently, the dean took a deep breath.
"I think I have them where I want them," he said.
Ketchum, for whom the world had changed immeasurably in the last few days, not only stopped puffing his pipe, but took the time to clean the burning weed from its clay bowl and crush the last sweet embers out upon the ground. Then he looked up. He had washed his face that
day and taken care to plait his unruly hair into a sort of war-braid. It did not disguise the craggy bestiality of his face, but nothing that he did would. He put the clay pipe carefully in his shirt pocket. "Where is that, my chieftain?"
"In the palm of my hand. They doubted my story until they saw the Vaults for themselves."
Ketchum could not be convinced to travel on the hover. Instead, he had watched the machine leave and return in one long day, a distance that would have taken a week on horseback. He had a sense now of how his ancestors could have become so careless and had lost everything. Life had been too easy for them. Ease made a man careless. It had made the dean careless, and he had lost the College Vaults because of it. He made a mental note to himself not to fall in the same way. "They believed you?" He
had not seen belief in all their faces. He wondered how the dean could have.
"They saw the destruction! It was graven in the earth, a testimony they could not overlook.''
Ketchum felt the mellow influence of the smoke phasing through him. He relaxed from his hunkering stance to a cross-legged sit. His legs had gone pleasantly numb. "They will help you attack the Seven Counties."
"Not yet, they won't—but they will soon." The dean took a deep draw. "I've arranged a little demonstration for them. My valued ally in the counties has met with an untimely end, but another has sprung up in his place. My longship returnees have not seen how far the human race has sunk." He gave a tight smile, showing his teeth. "I've no doubt Denethan can be goaded into showing them."
Ketchum allowed himself the luxury of a returning smile. The lizard men of the Mojave would shock the new people as nothing else had. The morning would bring interesting times.
Drakkar sat uneasily, watching the still forms of three people who'd formed the core of his existence among the Seven Counties. His fight wounds still ached and he could feel the burn of a fever flickering out even as he sat vigil. None of them breathed or stirred and yet—the blood did not pool blackly in their bodies, their eyes moved under their lids as if they dreamed violently and only Alma looked pale, as if she might have gone to meet death. He did not dare sleep himself, for fear Franklin or Stanhope might enter and misunderstand the scene. An afternoon and a night and the best part of another day had gone. His stomach made a twitch of hunger.
He paced the room stiffly, beads of sweat forming upon his brow. He paused to drink from a pitcher of water on Alma's bedstand. It was tepid like the temperature of the room. He stalked about restlessly, listening to other footsteps in the hallway past the bedroom door. No one noticed that he was missing from his room. He might well have been as cold and silent as the friends he watched.
It was beyond hope that Alma would have come to him when she found herself in trouble. But if she had, none of this would have come to pass. Dishonored, the Seven Counties would never have frowned if he'd courted her. Perhaps they would even have gladly discharged her burden into his hands. Or, if she had begged him to help her keep her secret, he would have married her and taken her home to the Mojave. Fortune had not given him that opportunity. He looked beyond the window pane and saw that the day had grown long shadows, and a pale moon hung on the horizon, before its time.
He sat and tried to rest again.
A boot heel smudged the planking outside the door. Drakkar stopped his musings, his crest coming up alertly as he realized the significance of the noise. He had no knife but had pulled Sir Thomas' from the belt sheath when the door swung open cautiously.
Tando came in sideways. His face showed little emotion beyond that of its scaled patterning as he saw the still forms of Sir Thomas, Lady Nolan, and Alma. A pigeon scroll was poised between the tips of his fingers. The Mojavan wore his nails a little long and sharpened to a point like claws.
"You are well?"
"I'll live," Drakkar said and heard with surprise how weak and tired his own voice was. "More than I can say for Shankar." He did not replace Thomas' knife, but sat back with it across his thighs.
"What happened here?"
"A seeing trance." Such things were not unheard of among the sensitives under Denethan's rule. It was the best explanation he could muster. Tando seemed to accept it. He dropped the scroll in Drakkar's palm. The fine gold seal had not been removed. Drakkar opened it and read carefully. Nesters were attacking viciously upon Denethan's borders. He was having to expend time and energy to repel them. It was a necessity that might divide his power enough to leave him open to the rebels. The scroll was, in effect, a warning to Drakkar that his father's leadership had reached a crisis it might not weather. He was inquiring if the Seven Counties had yet made a decision to move against the nesters in force.
Drakkar sighed. "Send out a pigeon. Tell him 'No.' Wish him luck from me."
"That is all?"
"That," said Drakkar wearily, looking at his friends in their stillness, "is almost more than I can spare." He would not have killed Shankar and brought the rebels to their knees, but once having felt the slow acting poison on the ambassador's blade, knew he could not have left him alive to work his ill. Now wheels were in motion he could not turn or brake. He was as helpless to aid his father as he was to help Alma. He watched Tando leave as quietly as he had crept in.
Like the arc of a falling leaf, Alma's chest moved in a breath. Then she ceased movement again. It might be morning before another one of them breathed again. He closed his burning eyes.
Thomas stumbled to a halt. He went to his knees, collapsing like a paper tent in a rainstorm, folding up like a newborn colt, and lay there, fighting only to breathe. He lifted his hand and placed it on the strand carrying Lady's colors. An electricity shocked up. He felt her presence as vividly as if she stood there with him. He levered himself to his knees holding onto the cable. He had been running the road without anchor, beginning or end. Now he knew he had to find her quickly. He was spent, and if he was, they must be also.
He fixed her in his thoughts as if he were dowsing for her soul, for the clean water purity of it behind the crustiness of her exterior. He closed his eyes as if he held a dowsing rod and searched for the wellspring that was the woman.
The span trembled behind him. Thomas' eyes flew open. He lost his grip on the strand. The upheaval that had passed before was buckling the void again, a nothingness beyond the dimness, only this—this nothingness was full, filled with . . . with something he could not touch with any of his senses. It sought out his fix on Lady Nolan and took it away from him, robbing him of his anchor and hope. It left behind a shadow, a reflection so dark he could see its silhouette clearly. It was a man, a nester perhaps, walking with a feral grace, back the way he'd come.
Thomas took a gulping breath. "Shit," he said strongly and keenly. His hands felt like ice. He tried crossing his arms and wanning them in the pits of his sweat-soaked shirt, but there was no warmth left in him. Something tremendous had crossed his pathway. Had it moved along another road, a road where only Lady was real?
He shook off his fear. The specter had passed on. He grabbed for the strand of sable and silver again and got to his feet. He could run no more. He stepped out on the road. He reached for the second strand, the faint tracing that was Alma, always fading and yet not diminished completely.
He found his anger and fresh energy and went after them.
Lady sat in the void, cradling Alma, the girl sprawled across her lap. Her ability to come and go had been stripped from her long before she'd felt Thomas take the bones. She could do nothing more than stay on the road she'd created, fueled from the fierce joy of birth and life with all its miseries, and hang on to Alma. She did not know if it had been hours or days.
She took her sleeve and wiped the dew from Alma's face. The girl stirred. Her eyelids fluttered.
"Let me go," she begged.
"No. Not you or the baby."
Alma opened her eyes. Huge eyes, Lady thought. Windows to her soul, if one knew to look into them. "He raped me,'' Alma whispered hoarsely.
"I know. But the
baby is innocent flesh. He may be the only good thing the dean has ever left in this world."
Alma looked away. "No good can ever come of this."
"He was never genetically altered. He was never contaminated by the eleven year plague. His sperm is the only thing about him that's not corrupt. You're no longer barren, Alma. Your promise is about to be fulfilled."
"Not with his child!"
"You have no choice now." Lady hugged her close. "If you had told me earlier ... but now . . . Alma, I can feel his soul burning to live as fiercely as yours does. Let me bring you back. I can purge the poisons out. You'll live. He'll live."
"No." A vicious shudder wracked the slender girl. "If the baby lives, he'll come after us. He'll pound the Seven Counties until he has what he wants, and what he wants is this child!"
A low, deep voice from the shadows about them said, "I agree." Thomas stepped into their sight. Even in the dim sensory confines of the ghost road, he radiated light. His hands seemed full of it.
Lady swallowed down the sudden, hard knot in her throat. "Thank God."
He held out the finger bones. "Lose something?"
She smiled wearily. "Nearly everything but the hope you'd come after us." She gathered up Alma, prepared to get to her feet.
But Thomas' face was not creased with welcome. His expression was drawn. He shook his head. "I won't take her back if she doesn't want to go."
Charles Ingrid - marked man 02 The Last Recall Page 25
