The Reign of the Departed

by Greg Keyes

  “Probably,” Aster agreed.

  “Good. Then go find your friends.”

  “I’m not sure they’re all my friends,” Aster said, and instantly regretted it. It was true, but why had she told Jezebel? She had just been told not to show weakness, and here she was whining about people not liking her.

  “You’ll sort that out too,” the old lady said.

  SIX

  A RAINBOW AND A HOLLOW SEA

  David felt it when Aster left town. He tried to follow her, of course, but the compass in his head betrayed him and brought him hard up against hills that proved unclimbable. Not that he didn’t try; torn fingernails and briar scratches on most of his exposed skin testified to that. When the direct approach failed, he tried to find a way around or at least a break in the steep ridge that would let him to the other side.

  It was daylight before he found such a place, and he felt Aster receding. But the going was easier beyond the hills, and the sickness in his heart relented. He was on her trail again.

  He knew now that he had blown his chance, back at the stream. He shouldn’t have tried talking to her. He should have grabbed her while she was bathing, gagged her, and tied her up with something. If he got another chance like that, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

  He’d only been across the hills for half an hour or so before he heard the hounds.

  “Jesus, no,” he muttered, and broke into a run. But even as he did so he knew it was hopeless. The dogs caught up with him an hour later, pinned him to the ground with their paws, and stayed on him until the Sheriff arrived.

  Jobe’s bunch was a little smaller, but all of the meanest ones seemed to have survived, which made sense. They also looked considerably less human than before, although they sounded the same when they talked.

  He thought that the Sheriff would probably beat him, but not to death, since he still needed his unerring sense of Aster’s direction.

  But the Sheriff just signed for him to walk.

  David took his cue and started in the right direction.

  “You’ve got the smell of the north wind on you,” the Sheriff said. “You talk to her?”

  “Yes,” David said. “For all the good it did.”

  “Did she say anything? About where she was going?”

  David wasn’t sure he ought to say anything, but he still felt the beating hanging over him, just waiting to happen. And he had been through enough.

  “Her father is sick,” he said. “She thinks there’s some sort of water that can heal him.”

  “Ah,” the Sheriff said. His gaze seemed to travel off toward the mountains. Then he switched his horse and rode ahead.

  They all had horses again, so she no longer needed to ride double. Aster had mixed feelings about that, and wondered if Billy would even let her touch him, after what had happened. He had hardly spoken two words to her since leaving Jezebel’s.

  Without really wanting to, she found herself riding behind and watching the others. Veronica, Errol, and Dusk rode close, laughing and talking, but it seemed to her that Errol was paying more attention to Dusk than Veronica, despite Veronica’s hovering about him that morning.

  She regarded Dusk with fresh eyes. Her father was the only person she knew from her family, so she’d had no sense of family resemblance until now. She wondered where Dusk was from and what their actual connection was. But mostly she wondered what was really going on. What were the odds that she would meet a cousin so soon after entering The Kingdoms? A cousin who was also far from home, in the region of the Marches where Aster and her father had once fled to Errol’s world? In a world bereft of magic, the probability was impossibly low. But in a realm where magical forces like destiny, fate, and weird were as much a part of the natural order as wind and rain, the impossible could become likely. And yet even here, coincidence was rare. Fate was the product of past actions, of curses and prophecy, of wishes and dreams. Some force beyond them both might have brought her and Dusk together.

  But the cleaner explanation was that Dusk had been looking for her. But if that was the case, why? And why hadn’t she said anything? She was so much a part of their group now that it was easy to forget that they had met her only just over a week ago, and that her stated reason for joining them was—to Aster at least—vague and unconvincing.

  David saw the land grow dry and strange, over the next few days. The trees shrank to bushes and became few, while the grass grew taller. The land rose up like a staircase built for giants, now so ancient and weathered that it was only rarely any trouble to ascend it. About twice a day they came to a crumbling escarpment and found some slope to mount.

  He experienced all of this in a nightmare of pain. Only three of the horses had survived the last fight, and one was the Sheriff’s. The other two were used for scouting ahead, which meant David and the rest of the boys were on foot. It made them slower than Aster’s group, who all had horses, so the Sheriff pushed them hard, and David’s feet became a mass of blisters. His whole body ached.

  It slowed them even more when the boys had to hunt for food, but game was scarce, and David’s belly was flat and empty.

  Jobe enjoyed tormenting him.

  “You ain’t much, are you?” the boy taunted him one day. “Running off from the fight like that.” “I went to find her,” he said. “Aster.”

  “Yeah. And she bloodied your nose something good, didn’t she. No, you ain’t much.”

  “What do you know?” David said. “You’re as ignorant as they come.”

  “Well, that may be,” Jobe replied. “But I don’t see as how anything you’ve learnt from your books has done you much good.”

  “It’s kept me human,” he said. “It’s kept me from becoming an animal, like you.”

  “What do you mean?” Jobe asked.

  It seemed an odd question to David. Jobe’s eyes were a peculiar lead color, and his skin had become mottled with short, bristling fur. His ears had sharpened, too, and he had claws instead of nails. His body had a human shape when he sat, but on his feet his gait had become strange and quick. The other boys were broadly the same, with variations in fur and eye color.

  Of course he hadn’t been talking about Jobe’s appearance anyway, but it was strange Jobe didn’t even consider taking his comment that way.

  “I mean the way you act,” he said. “How you are when we come to a village.”

  A mean grin twitched on Jobe’s face. “Oh, that. That’s nothing to do with your learning. That’s just you being scared. That’s you being a whiney little girl.”

  “I’m not scared to hurt people,” David said. “I don’t want to. It’s not right. It’s not what good people do.”

  “You tell me, Whipped, what Goddamn good people you’re talking about? Our parents, that kill us for sport six days a week and expect us all ‘yes sir and ma’am’ on Sunday? Is that who you mean? You mean you?”

  “I try,” David said. “I try to make a difference.”

  “And how do you do that?” Jobe asked.

  “I pass on what I know,” David said. “I teach young men and women how to reason. I lead them to what the greatest thinkers in history have said and written—philosophy, poetry, literature. And from that they can come to lead thoughtful lives, become better people. There’s more to life than just surviving, Jobe. As a great man once said, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you should always be trying to know yourself, to understand your actions,” David said.

  “Hell, I understand myself,” Jobe said. “I want something, I take it if I can and deal with it if I can’t. I watch my boys and they watch me. It ain’t too hard.”

  David shook his head.

  “You know what you want,” he said. “A dog knows that. It’s not the same as knowing who you are.”

  Jobe stared at him for a long moment.

  “And you reckon you know who you are?” he asked.

  �
�I know I try,” David said.

  “Well,” Jobe said. He scratched himself behind the ear.

  “That fellow,” he said. “That said that. He alive still?”

  “No,” David said. “How did he die?”

  “People didn’t like some of his ideas,” David told him. “They said he was corrupting the youth and sentenced him to drink poison.”

  Jobe grinned nastily.

  “Well, he might have thought his life was worth living,” he said. “You know, on account of the examining and all—but I reckon those that disagreed got their way.”

  “That’s not the point,” David said, wearily.

  “Your problem, preacher,” Jobe said, “is you think you have a point. But you go on, examine yourself.”

  David started to say something, but then something hit him from behind. He gagged on the pain and fell roughly to the ground. Someone kicked him in the ribs, and when he managed to open his eyes he saw them, maybe ten of them, standing over him, growling low in the back of their throats. For a second he thought it might be over, but then they came at him again. He screamed, which they thought was funny, and he suddenly knew he was going to die. The sheer terror of it was like nothing he had ever experienced; worse than the scalding water he’d once spilled on his bare leg.

  But he heard the Sheriff’s horn, and a deep-throated shout, and the pummeling stopped. He couldn’t open his eyes, and his ears were filled with the painful, shallow breaths thrashing in and out of his lungs.

  “We need him,” the Sheriff said.

  Nothing was broken, but everything hurt. He couldn’t keep any sort of pace, so the Sheriff put him on his horse, where he rode bent over the saddle with his head on the beast’s neck, oblivious to and uncaring about the land his mount’s feet trod. The next day was a little better. The Sheriff gave him whisky, and he drank it in little sips throughout the day.

  Near sundown they came to a neat little village of sod houses. He and the Sheriff climbed a hill and watched the boys ride down on it. David wanted to feel something about it, but to his despair found he couldn’t. He felt as hollow as the empty shell of a cicada, split open and abandoned. His one shameful thought was that at least he would have something to eat.

  The screaming and shooting started, and David slumped off and found a rock to sit against, and finished the whisky.

  Aster. His eyes watered up. He knew that her father had done something to him, but it didn’t matter. He had imagined their meeting many times. Never had his fantasies involved the cold, dismissive rejection she had treated him to. She should have been grateful for his attention. Some girls practically begged him for it. Who was she to think she was better than he?

  A painful nudge in the ribs made him realize he’d dropped off to sleep. The boys were standing around him, and for a minute he thought they were going to start beating him again, and the fear rose up in his belly. Then they shoved a girl at him.

  She was young, pretty, terror writ clearly on her face.

  “Go to it,” Jobe said.

  “No,” David said.

  “Ain’t you a man?” Jobe demanded. “Go to it.”

  They were all looking at him, the way third graders looked at a classmate who had crapped in his pants. The disgust and disdain was palpable. Even the girl felt it; he saw relief creep across her features.

  “Leave me alone with her,” David said.

  But they didn’t move.

  He looked back at the girl and saw the flicker of hope and gratitude in her eyes, the light inside of her, shining through him now, through the prism hidden within him. It had been present all along, but now it turned, so that the light passed through it and shattered into rainbow. Everything in him and everything beyond was suddenly impossibly vivid. The colors blazed on the girl’s face, but deeper than that, to the shimmer in her. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and he wanted it. Had to have it.

  It belonged to him, after all.

  The disguise of her features fell away and he knew her for who she really was.

  “Aster,” he breathed.

  “No,” Aster said, but he knew she didn’t understand.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said. “This won’t hurt.”

  She started screaming then, but he knew that before he was through she would stop, that she would understand what he was doing for her. That it was all for the best, and that then Jobe would leave the both of them alone.

  “I love you, Aster,” he whispered.

  Well. That’s a Hollow Sea,” Errol commented.

  “It’s all right there in the name,” Veronica agreed. And yet Errol thought the name misleading. He had expected a big dry depression, with fish skeletons and such. This wasn’t that.

  For days the land had become higher and more arid, until finally it was a desert of red rock, sand, and scrubby evergreens. Now it suddenly plunged away in a nearly sheer cliff. It was less like a sea and more like the Grand Canyon, except the other side wasn’t visible. Any more than the bottom was; looking down he could only see layers of progressively darker haze. It went off to the east as far as he could see, and west was the same except that mountains verged the rim.

  “Do we know how far across this is?” Errol asked.

  “Depends,” Billy said.

  “On what?”

  “It just depends,” he replied.

  Billy didn’t make sense a lot of the time.

  Aster dismounted and walked along the edge. After a moment, Errol followed her.

  “I hope you have some kind of flying spell up your sleeve, Aster.”

  He turned to look at her, and she had an odd glint in her eyes.

  “I know this place,” she whispered. “I’ve been here. With Dad.”

  “Do you remember how you got across?”

  “Yes,” she said, still softly. “I remember.” She looked east and west.

  “But I don’t know which way.”

  Aster opened her mouth again, paused and shook her head. “It’s nearly dark,” she said. “We should find a place to camp. I’ll figure it out.”

  They made camp in the ruins of a tower perched by the abyss, with a good view back the way they had come. As Billy started a fire, Errol asked him how far behind he thought the Sheriff was.

  “Depends,” he said. “Depends on how many horses they have, for one thing. And how much Chula and his boys managed to mislead them.”

  “Not much at all, I think,” Aster said. “It’s me.”

  “He wants us, too,” Errol said.

  “No,” she replied. “So stupid. I should have known it as soon as I saw Mr. Watkins. That’s how he keeps finding us.”

  “I don’t get it,” Errol said.

  “Dad must have done more than just send Mr. Watkins after me. Think about it—once he was out of the house he would have gone straight to the police or whatever. So Dad cursed him to follow me obsessively. He probably gets sick or something if he tries to do anything else. That’s why he seemed so crazy back at the village, I guess. But Dad must have also spelled him to sense where I am, or at least know what direction I’m in.”

  “So if we aren’t with you, he can’t find Errol and me,” Veronica said.

  Aster nodded. “That’s right,” she said.

  “Too bad you didn’t figure this out back at the village,” Veronica said. “If you didn’t, that is.”

  “I didn’t,” Aster snapped. Then she sighed. “But I should have.”

  Veronica was looking at Errol and he knew what she was thinking. So did Aster.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Like I told you back at the village . . .”

  He had never heard Aster sound hopeless before. It was actually a shock.

  “No,” Errol said.

  Veronica folded her arms.

  “Now wait a minute,” she said.

  Everyone turned toward her.

  “Aster needed you to find me,” Veronica said. “She needed me to get here. She needs the gi
ant for something-or-other. But what do we need her for?”

  Errol sighed. “We can’t—”

  “Who is ‘we’?” she snapped. “You let me finish.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “What I mean,” Veronica said, “is that we could finish this quest. Let her go back and hide out in the village. We’ll go find the giant and the water and all that and then come back for her.”

  Errol blinked. “That’s really smart,” he said.

  “I know that, Errol,” Veronica said.

  “She’ll never make it back to the village,” Billy pointed out.

  “Oh, I bet she could,” Veronica replied. “If she put her mind to it, and some of her witchy ways.”

  “I might,” Aster granted. “But it won’t work. I have to be there.”

  “Do you know that for sure?” Veronica asked.

  Aster was silent for a moment.

  “I don’t know it for a fact,” she admitted. “But I feel it. And no one is going on unless I figure out how to cross the Hollow Sea.”

  Veronica looked a little sour, but she nodded.

  Billy and Aster scrounged firewood while Errol, Dusk, and Veronica explored the ruins. Errol tried to imagine what sort of people had lived here, on what seemed like the edge of the world. Whoever they might have been, they hadn’t left many clues about themselves, or someone else had taken them all, because the tower itself aside, Errol saw no trace of human occupation.

  As the sun set, Errol climbed to the top of the stone structure. He almost asked Veronica if she wanted to join him, but she seemed lost in her own little world, and anyway he wasn’t sure he wanted to encourage her too much. He wasn’t sure what he wanted.

  Venus blazed in the west, and soon the other stars appeared. The silvery light of a crescent moon fell into the empty sea, and it seemed to him faint ripples, and quick, slender shadows stirred upon the abyss.

  He looked at Venus and drew a deep breath.

  A breath. It tickled in his ribcage like a bird trying to get out. He knew it was an illusion, that he couldn’t really have taken a breath, so he felt his face to confirm that it was still wooden. It was, but it somehow felt more pliant, like hard rubber rather than wood.