The Narrowing Path: The Complete Trilogy (The Narrowing Path Series Book 4)

by David J Normoyle

  “Kissing until near death. Now that’s a danger I’m willing to face.” He leaned in again, but Iyra stopped him. “You realize someone could be watching us right now, don’t you?”

  “Don’t stop on account of us,” a strange voice called out.

  Bowe and Iyra stumbled apart. Iyra held up her hands. “Don’t shoot, we’re unarmed. There’s no one at the tower except us.”

  “Really?” The voice had a strange accent. “Usually when there’s a circle of torches with a kissing couple in front of a tower, it’s a sure sign of an ambush.”

  “I’m a friend of Washima,” Iyra said. “He’ll want us unharmed.”

  A troop of soldiers walked into the circle of light. They wore chainmail, helmets, and black cloaks, and they carried short swords in their right hands and long, rectangular shields in their left. The man who led them sheathed his sword as he approached. “I guess the show’s over. Will we get a kissing couple in front of other watchtowers? Our army manual is detailed, but it doesn’t mention what to do in that case.”

  Bowe found his undisguised amusement annoying. “You don’t just gawk at them like twelve-year-olds.”

  “Noted for future reference,” the officer said. He turned to two of his men. “Make sure they’re telling the truth that there’s no one else inside.” The two men entered the tower and returned a short time later.

  “No one else inside, but a number of bodies and plenty of weapons.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” the officer said. He indicated that Bowe and Iyra should lead the rest of them into the watchtower. “My job is to hold this tower, so I’ll keep you here with me until I get further orders. Perhaps you can tell me how all this came to be.”

  “My friend here needs medical attention,” Iyra said as they were going in.

  “That will have to wait until tomorrow,” the officer said.

  Chapter 16

  Day 34

  Bowe opened his eyes. He couldn’t make out what was going on around him. The world kept falling out of focus, and everything was blurry. He could make out colors—mainly white—but not shapes. Bowe closed his eyes and tried to remember what had happened and where he was. Dulnato and the White Spider killing each other. The White Spider being a woman. That seemed so absurd that he couldn’t be sure if he was getting dreams and reality mixed up. The watchtower, kissing Iyra, then the Jarindor soldiers coming. It was coming back to him. He was taken to a Jarindor hospital the next day and that was the last thing he could remember. That must be where he was. The hospital.

  He opened his eyes again, and this time he could see better. He was in a white tent. The tent was large but a canvas screen had been pulled across, closing off the small area he was in. Although his vision had improved, there was still a fogginess at the back of his brain. That made sense now that he knew he was in a hospital—they had given him something for the pain. Bowe glanced down at himself. A white sheet covered him, and both of his hands were bandaged. He lifted his left arm and was glad to see that he could wiggle all of his fingers. That seemed to have improved. He lifted his right arm, and—

  He closed his eyelids, held them closed, then slowly opened them again. He had to make sure it wasn’t just his eyes deceiving him. Unfortunately it wasn’t some trick of the light. The top of his forearm was wrapped tight with bandages, but they stopped below his wrist. Below that there was nothing. His hand was gone.

  He let his right arm fall back down and turned his head so that he stared into the far corner of the tent. Thoughts about what this meant for him kept spiraling into his head, but he forced them away. He didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t feel any pain, but he nearly wished there was something to indicate what had happened. Now, there was just an absence. A nothingness. He tried not to cry, but a few stray tears fell from his eyes.

  “I see you’re awake.” A man appeared in Bowe’s line of sight. “I’m Paulini and I’m your doctor.” He clasped his palms together and bowed his head.

  “You did this to me?” Bowe’s voice was emotionless. He didn’t focus on the man’s face; his eyes remained fixed in the distance over the doctor’s head.

  “I’m afraid we had no choice. Your entire hand was riddled with gangrene. We did well to save as much as we could. You’re lucky to be alive—another few days without treatment and there would have been nothing we could do. Even now I’m worried that the gangrene has spread to other parts of your body, or that you have blood poisoning. No signs of it yet, though, so I expect you’re over the worst of it.”

  Bowe heard the words but he barely registered them. He didn’t want to think, he didn’t want to feel.

  “How’s the pain?” Paulini asked. “We’ve pumped you so full of pain pills that you shouldn’t be able to feel anything.”

  Bowe focused on Paulini. “The pain is still bad,” he said. “I need more pills.” There was no pain, at least no physical pain, but Bowe wanted to not be able to feel anything at all.

  The doctor hesitated, but after a moments’ thought he left and returned with some pills. He put them in Bowe’s mouth, lifted Bowe’s head, and tilted a glass of water to his lips, allowing Bowe to take small sips and swallow the pills. As Bowe had hoped, his mind fell into the fog and into unconsciousness.

  Chapter 17

  Day 35

  A shaking rattled Bowe awake. He opened his eyes to see Paulini in front of him. “Wake up,” the doctor instructed him. “You can’t sleep forever.”

  Bowe didn’t want to wake. “I need more pills.”

  Paulini shook his head. “Not now. I’ve started to wean you off of them. You have to face what has happened.”

  Bowe turned his head away from Paulini and stared into the corner.

  “Can’t look at my ugly face, is that it?”

  Bowe didn’t reply. Paulini was in his forties with black wavy hair, and there was nothing ugly about his face. Bowe just wanted him to go away.

  “Unfortunately you’re stuck with me until you’re ready to leave. I hope that will be soon. The most important thing for you to do now is eat. You have been hand-fed a few times over the last few days—you were out of it on pills each time, so you probably don’t remember. But you haven’t had a decent meal in several days. You might not know it right now, but your body is starving.” Paulini reached under Bowe’s bed and made an adjustment that tilted the front half of the bed forward, forcing Bowe into a sitting position.

  “Put me back down,” Bowe demanded, but Paulini ignored him. “There’s food beside you.” He walked around the canvas screen and into the other part of the hospital.

  Bowe turned his head away from the food, but he couldn’t escape the smell even when he shoved his face into the pillow. As soon as the doctor mentioned food, Bowe had realized how hungry he was. He wanted to refuse to eat just to spite the doctor, but his stomach rumbled painfully. He sat up and scowled at the food on the small table beside him. It looked different from anything he’d eaten before, but it sure smelled good.

  Bowe decided that if he was going to spite the doctor, it might as well be on a full stomach. He sat up fully, reached for the plate of food, then stopped. He’d reached with his right hand. The blank space where his hand should have been mocked him. He wanted to shout and yell at the missing hand, blame it for what it had done to him, curse it for turning him into a cripple, but it wasn’t there to do any of those things to.

  He reached across his body with the left hand and picked up the plate and placed it in his lap. The fingers of his left were still clumsy and the bandages around the palm made it awkward to use. Bowe took up a spoon and began to eat. The food tasted delicious, but that might have been just because of how hungry he was.

  * * *

  “That didn’t take long.” Paulini came back in just as Bowe finished eating.

  Bowe looked away. Just because he’d eaten his food didn’t mean he was going to be best friends with the person who cut his hand off.

  “How’s the pain?” Pau
lini asked.

  There was a slight throbbing in his right arm; Bowe had barely noticed it while he ate. “Very bad,” he said.

  “Hopefully the pain will die down. You seem to have made a remarkable recovery other than that,” Paulini said. “Young bodies often heal much faster than I expect.”

  “So my hand will be growing back any day now, will it?”

  “It’ll take time to get used to that,” Paulini said. “The physical healing will be the easiest part.”

  “No. I think cutting it off was the easiest part.”

  The venom in Bowe’s voice made Paulini pause for a moment, and then he dragged over a chair, put it beside Bowe’s bed, and sat down. “Let’s talk. What should we talk about?”

  “You’re a doctor. Shouldn’t you be healing patients, not bothering them?”

  “We brought plenty of doctors on the trip, but we haven’t seen any battles yet, so there are as many doctors as patients.”

  “You can talk if you want—I can’t stop you, but I’ve no intention of listening.” Bowe wondered where Iyra was; he was surprised she hadn’t visited him. Possibly she stayed away because he was now a cripple.

  “Let’s talk about ignorance as a central tenant in a mode of governance. Since you’re a Guardian of Arcandis, you’ll no doubt be familiar with that.”

  Bowe hadn’t realized that the doctor knew who he was, though he guessed it wasn’t surprising. Iyra would have told them; she was on their side after all.

  “When we came to this planet, all the different countries took different routes in terms of molding their legacy, and the Jarindors and Arcandi are on different ends of the spectrum. No surprise that we wouldn’t agree on much.”

  “What do you mean, ‘when we came to this planet’?” Bowe had blurted it out before he remembered he didn’t intend to talk to Paulini.

  Paulini looked at Bowe blankly for a second then shook his head. “Sorry, I didn’t realize the Arcandi were that ignorant. You know how and why we came here, don’t you?”

  “We were born here. What else is there to know?”

  “Have you ever wondered how we came to being on this world? It’s a harsh place, with the Infernam coming every six years, and we humans and our farm animals are not adapted to it. Ever wonder how those gigantic Refuges were created?”

  “I guess we dug them out. Perhaps they were old mines.” Though Bowe remembered his awe at the size of the Refuge, and he understood that mine tunnels were narrow.

  “And before they were dug out, how did the people who didn’t have Refuges survive the Infernam?” Paulini asked. “How did farm animals come to be on this planet when they can only survive so long as humans bring them into the Refuge every six years?

  Bowe opened his mouth to answer then closed it again. He’d never thought about that before.

  “Humans came from a different planet called old-Earth,” Paulini said. “Or, at least, that’s what we call it, I imagine they just called it Earth. The technology these old-Earth humans created is unimaginable to us. I’ve seen some descriptions and drawings.” Paulini shook his head. “The fact that they were able to travel the vast distances of space to come here shows what they were capable of.”

  Bowe glanced above him, even though all he could see was the tent ceiling. “They could fly, these old-Earth humans? Fly among the stars?”

  “They created massive metal ships that could fly up into the sky and out into space.”

  “Why did they want to do that?”

  “At first it was curiosity. They wanted to go farther, learn more, become better. But with all their advancements they ended up destroying their planet, destroying old-Earth, so they had to explore the stars to find new homes.”

  Bowe shook his head in confusion. “And we are these old-Earth humans, or what became of them? That doesn’t make any sense. Where are the flying metal ships?”

  “According to what I’ve read, the old-Earth humans found only a few suitable planets. This was one of the worst, with Helion passing every six years. There were a small number of old-Earth humans who wanted a new society without any technology, and those old-Earth humans were given this planet. So they created a number of Refuges and did something called terraforming that made the planet old-Earth-like as much as possible with similar vegetation and animals and insects. Everything had to be planned to deal with the Infernam, so the vegetation that was used would grow back fast after a fire, insects were ones that could adapt to extreme heat, birds were taught migration patterns that kept them safe every six years. Even with all the technology, this took generations.”

  Bowe closed his eyes, trying to take all this in. It was like seeing the world in a different light—everything was the same, yet slightly different. “If all this is true, why is it a secret?”

  “It’s only a secret to the Arcandi. The other countries know about it. Certain land areas on this planet were chosen as countries, and in each country a Refuge was created and a community was settled. The leaders were called Guardians. Each community had their own ideas on how to structure their society. The Guardians were tasked with preserving that structure and ensuring that technology was never allowed to develop. In Jarind, we have never been afraid of knowledge, always trying to preserve it and learn. We just don’t pursue paths that lead to technology. Nothing that resembles a machine is allowed to be created.”

  “What’s a machine?”

  “It’s like something made of metal that can perform tasks.”

  “A piece of metal that’s alive?” Bowe’s mind was whirring, trying to understand everything Paulini was telling him.

  “I guess that’s one way of looking at it. The reason you don’t know about this is because Arcandis took a stricter viewpoint in their quest to avoid the return of technology. Knowledge was restricted. In the beginning it wasn’t as severe, but the Guardians’ views must have hardened over time. From what Washima told me, I don’t believe there are any books here containing knowledge from old-Earth.”

  “There are old children’s books. Do you mean to say that the animals described in them like lions and wolves and dragons are real? They are old-Earth creatures who were not brought here?”

  Paulini laughed. “Lions and wolves are real. Or they were, at least—I’m not sure if they were settled on other planets. Dragons are what you believed them to be—imagined creatures for children’s stories.”

  “How do you know all this? About old-Earth and about the Arcandis Guardians?” Bowe was starting to believe Paulini—as hard as it was to believe about flying ships, real lions, metal beings—because the man seemed so sure. Who could make up something like that?

  “Like I said, in Jarind we preserve knowledge; there is a massive library full of books, many of them written by people from old-Earth. And those Jarindors who love books often dedicate themselves to making copies so that they’ll never be lost. There’s information about the settling of the planet in the great library describing the plans of each country. What I read about the initial plans for Arcandis was very different from the reports written by Washima.” He shuddered. “Those reports made me feel physically ill.”

  Despite Bowe’s fascination with all this new information, he was sick of the outlander’s disparaging remarks about Arcandis. “You aren’t much better than us. You brought an army to our doorstep. You came to invade us.”

  “It’s not like that,” Paulini said. “We mean no harm to anyone. We are not a war-like people—far from it. Over the last three years we have recruited this army from volunteers. We based the weaponry and organization on an old-Earth civilization called the Romans. The Romans were able to defeat ten times their number when facing undisciplined opponents. We chose the black cloak to signify that this is a dark thing we do, to take up arms against another country. We only do it because we must act now that we know the nature of the society of Arcandis. We come merely to help the ordinary people from the horror that the country has turned into.”

  “It’s not
that bad.” Bowe bristled. “There are problems, but we can fix them ourselves.”

  “It hasn’t changed in a long time, as I understand it. I remember your name from Washima’s reports. You were the ascor boy he met who was doing the Green Path. Right?”

  Bowe nodded. It felt strange to know that people in other countries had read something that mentioned him by name.

  “I’m not sure how you went on to becoming a Guardian. I don’t claim to know your ways that well. But the Green Path, you were part of it—can you not see how barbaric it is? Hundreds of teenage boys fighting in a strange death match that only a handful will survive.”

  “It’s our way.” Bowe agreed that the Green Path was wrong, but he wasn’t going to say that to this doctor. Paulini thought he knew more about it than Bowe just by reading a few lines in a report. “You don’t understand.”

  “It’s not just the Green Path,” Paulini said. “The Fortress, the way escay are treated by ascor, the way ascor women are treated, and the callous way that so many are forced to kill themselves when they can’t get into the Refuge every six years. The Green Path is only the smallest part of what’s wrong with Arcandis. How could the Guardians have allowed this society to have become so corrupt?”

  “It’s the nature of the Infernam,” Bowe said. “Only so many can survive. Why didn’t those in the flying ships make the Refuges bigger if they could do so many wonderful and magical things?”

  “I wish they did make them bigger,” Paulini said. “But the size of the Refuges was decided by the first Guardians.”

  “Are you saying that they could have made them much bigger if they wanted to? Let everyone in? And they decided not to, and now everyone who can’t fit in must die instead? You said we were the barbaric ones.”

  “It sounds harsh. But whatever size they made them, eventually the population would grow to fill them. That was the problem on old-Earth. The amount of people became too big, and the only way they could manage was with more and more technology and eventually the planet became overloaded. Used up. So the Refuges were designed to allow the population to expand, but only in a controlled and limited way. I’m sure those who terraformed the planet couldn’t imagine things turning out as badly as they have here. The two main tasks of the Guardians of each country were to ensure that population growth didn’t get out of hand and that technology advances didn’t occur.”