Palaces of Light

by James Axler

  “Doc, if they were unendurable, you would have bought the farm, and I wouldn’t have to listen to your interminable complaints,” Mildred countered in a voice that was as dry as Doc’s. Albeit that she had preserved hers by holding her peace for what seemed to be far too many miles while the old man moaned and droned on, his voice like the drip of water wearing away at her patience. At that, the fact that it made her think of water at a time when they were preserving theirs and putting aside thoughts of slaking their ravaging thirst was something that only served to increase her irritation.

  “All I am trying to point out is that the baron may be rewarding us well for our endeavors if we achieve our goal, but he has not exactly given us the tools with which to finish the job.” He paused for a moment, his head cocked in thought, much to Mildred’s relief. Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last, and before she had a chance to breathe a sigh of relief he had started again, albeit on a different tack.

  “Strange, but by the Three Kennedys, that phrase strikes a resonant chord deep within the caverns of remembrance! Perhaps it was something that one of the three blessed ones themselves uttered at some point. Or some such personage, one who shared an exalted position similar to that—”

  He was cut short with a sudden action. Mildred, realizing that his sudden ramblings, now that they had veered from the simple grumblings of before, presaged a descent into the kind of temporary madness that blighted his life—and therefore by extension hers and those of her fellow travelers—turned and slapped him across the face. Hard. She was about five yards from him, just in front, and so to achieve this action she had to spin and then take a step back that added to the momentum of her swinging arm. She caught the old man with a full and open palm.

  In the quiet of the arid and deserted plain, with no sound from the others beyond the muffled padding of boots on hard-packed sand, the blow sounded large and shocking. Doc’s head snapped on his neck, his eyes wide with shock and his jowls shaken by the impact of the blow. It resounded so loud in their collective silence that the others stopped to turn and face Doc and Mildred.

  For a moment Doc stared blankly into Mildred’s face. From his expression she couldn’t tell if he would cry, yell, hit her or pass out.

  He did none of those things. Instead, a slow grin spread across his face as he held a hand up to his stinging cheek.

  “Madam,” he said slowly, “there must be other, and perhaps better ways in which to bring a man back from the brink of the abyss. But I would doubt if there are any that would have such an immediate effect. Do you know, for a moment there I could hear myself and found it quite hard to credit the things that were coming from my mouth. It is very hard to describe, as though one is separated from oneself and observing from a distance. To be back in a place where the mind and body occupy the same place is a pleasure. Even if—” he added, looking around “—it is such a place as this.”

  The others had stopped to watch, taken aback by the sudden explosion of violence in Mildred’s behavior. Doc’s mumbling moan had become little more than a background sound to them, marking and punctuating each footfall. In truth, each of them was finding the going tough, and to waste time on the disjointed grumbling of the old man was more effort than they felt they could spare.

  Now, almost forced into a halt by the turn of events, it became obvious that they had become mechanical in their actions, and for the first time in several hours under the baking skies they stopped to look at one another.

  “He’s right about the wag, though,” Krysty said in a voice ravaged by the climate and by the lack of water. “At least we could have made some kind of shelter for the worst of the day.”

  Ryan shook his head slowly. To speak was a great effort, so he used his words sparingly. “Can’t get too close. They’re on foot. Too much risk of them seeing dust clouds if we used wheels.”

  Jak sniffed. “Get too far, lose touch.”

  J.B. cast a long glance into the far distance. Toward the horizon, it seemed as though the vista in front of them was devoid of life. Only toward the edge of land and sky, where the two met in an indistinct haze, was there anything that could in any way be construed as signs of life. Even then, the specks that moved in the sealike mirage of wavering light might have been nothing more than phantoms of imagination. Following the Armorer’s gaze, Ryan could barely focus his only functioning orb on them. If he was honest, he knew they were real only because he had been tailing them for so long, and in an area about thirty miles back where there had been some jagged outcrops that jutted savagely from the earth to provide some kind of cover, he had been able to get close enough to take stock of the enemy.

  “Should have taken them then,” J.B. murmured, as though able to read the one-eyed man’s mind.

  Ryan allowed a grin to crack the previously grim set of his jaw. J. B. Dix had traveled with him for so long that each man knew the other’s way of thinking.

  “You know why we couldn’t do that,” he said simply, for the Armorer, as he was also known, was only too well aware.

  “Yeah. Can’t lose the captives. Can’t return without them. And if we don’t, then there’s no point in us having come this far.”

  Ryan shrugged. There was nothing more to say. With a gesture, he indicated that they should start to move forward. Wearily, and with a resignation born of knowing that objective could only be achieved with further suffering, they began to move in a straggling line once more.

  Ryan and Krysty were at the front, almost side by side. Jak came in their wake, with J.B. behind him. Mildred hung back a little, partly because she wanted to avoid the choking and irritating dust that they raised with their heels, and partly because she felt beholden to keep an eye on Doc. The old man—in some ways, and yet not others, as he was centuries old in conception yet had lived a span not much longer than any of them—was lagging behind. The ravages of his past experience made it hard for him sometimes to keep up in extreme conditions, his body having suffered at the hands of too many to sustain the levels of stamina sometimes needed. His tenacity, however, and sheer determination could sometimes equalize him with his peers.

  As they made their weary way in the wake of the party they trailed, Ryan played over the options in his mind.

  They had to have been crazy to take this one on. Sure, they needed the jack and the supplies that this would bring, but at what cost? It irritated him when they were reduced to hiring out their services like the mercies of the days before skydark. The highest bidder got the service, and screw what the mission may be. There were certain things that they wouldn’t do. Honor might have been a word that had lost all meaning postnukecaust, but Ryan still had to be able to look at himself in a mirror and be satisfied with what he saw. In their own ways, all of them had codes that they lived by. And those codes were basically the same. It was one of the things that bound them together.

  This job was different from most others they’d taken on. The way the baron told it, some coldhearts had taken all the children in the ville. Why was a mystery; how was an even bigger one. Despite his best efforts, Ryan had been unable to understand what had occurred. All he knew was that the baron was willing to pay them a lot of jack to rescue the ville’s children.

  While it was true that a ville was lost without kids—without the next generation a ville could do nothing but wither and buy the farm, at the mercy of an aging population and an outside world that grew progressively younger and stronger—still it was more than just altruism that had driven the baron’s desperate bargaining. The fact that one of the kids taken was his own had a greater bearing on his willingness to give ground than perhaps his people would have liked, had they been privy to the negotiations.

  The thing was, with his own kid being involved, he was willing to pay a lot to get her back. Conversely, what information was he holding back that might make them decide not to take the job? Ryan wondered
.

  How had these coldhearts taken the kids so easily? What danger did they really present?

  Perhaps that was part of the reason that he was trailing at a distance: caution for his people until they had a real chance to recce the situation.

  But it had better come soon.

  * * *

  LIGHT BECAME DARK easily in the barren wasteland. Heads down, focused on keeping one foot in front of another at a steady pace that ate up the ground, ignoring the thirst that gnawed at their parched throats, the companions didn’t notice the passing of time. Suddenly the light around them became much dimmer, and the sands that reflected light and heat at them became much cooler.

  “Dark night, how long have we been doing this?” J.B. asked in a voice that was barely above a croak. It was so quiet that it was hard to tell if he was talking to anyone in particular, or just to himself.

  Nonetheless, Ryan opted to answer. Looking at his wrist chron, alarmed at how the heat and sweat in his eye made it hard to focus on its face, he said, “Too long, J.B. Hours. We should have taken a water break a couple of hours back.”

  “Mebbe have plenty time do that,” Jak observed morosely, gesturing at the horizon.

  Ryan followed the direction indicated by the albino teen. Although he could now see the group of people in the far distance much more clearly than a few hours previously, the horizon no longer blurred and obscured by the haze of the day’s heat, the group was greatly diminished from the one they had been following up to this point.

  “What the fuck…” he whispered.

  “Unless they’re walking off the edge of the world—and I wouldn’t blame them if it goes on like this—then I figure that the plains must be about to take a huge dip,” Krysty said with a wry twist to her tone.

  “If that is so, then I would suggest we take advantage of the drop in temperature and step up the pace, lest we lose track of them,” Doc suggested. “It would, after all, be a great pity to come this far only to lose them in a hole in the ground.”

  Mildred grinned. “Not like you to be understated,” she said hoarsely, the smile cracking her dry lips.

  Ryan, however, was in no mood to take such humor at face value. “Shit,” he swore in frustration, “we’ll take in some water, then try to step it up. I know you want to rest, people, but mebbe we’ll get lucky and be able to take a break when we find where they’ve disappeared to.”

  The other five all experienced a sinking feeling in the pits of their stomachs when they heard what the one-eyed man had to say. Yet each of them had already steeled him or herself for the difficult trek ahead, knowing that it was necessary, and that Ryan only spoke what they all knew to be true.

  Without another word, they took great drinks of water to rehydrate and fortify themselves before setting off in grim silence for the target.

  The way ahead was nothing but a hard slog. They had to focus on getting to the target, and not waste time and energy on anything else. Even the encroaching darkness and cold seemed to be peripheral to the goal that filled their minds. But before the blanket of night finally descended, and they had only the pale wan light of a cloudless moon to light their way, Ryan was able to see that the last of the group of people ahead of them had vanished from view. How far was the horizon from where they were? Apparently, always the same distance.

  No, he thought, shaking his head a little to clear the muzziness that came with fatigue and the chill that crept into their bones. The question was, how much land lay between themselves and the horizon at any given time? That was how far ahead their prey was from where they stood now. And if he knew that, then he could work out how long it would take them to cover that distance and so find out where that prey had gone, and how long until they could even think about stopping.

  The figures rushed around his head, producing a different answer with each thought, and making him question his own sanity. And yet that futile train of thought served a purpose: the longer and more complicated the train of thought, then the more distance it ate up without his noticing the effort it took to drag his body across the arid plain, gray in the moonlight.

  In their own ways, and with their own trains of thought, the others did the same. It was a way of shutting out the cold, just as they had tried to shut out the heat.

  So it was that they came upon the fissure before they truly had a chance to register what was up ahead. It had looked like nothing more than a patch of ground that was darker than the surrounding area. It was only that the land beneath their feet grew less smooth, rougher and more broken, that the presentiment of any danger became apparent. The pale light of the crescent moon had been little enough, but somehow the land around had seemed to soak up what little light prevailed.

  Another time, perhaps, any of them would have noticed. But, tired and worn by their self-enforced march, they were receptive to the change before it was almost too late. Ryan, still in front, had registered that the ground was less certain beneath his boots, but had put this subconsciously down to a minor change in the terrain than anything that should take his attention.

  Perhaps it was the night around them dulling his senses. Perhaps it was the dehydration and the introspection that had enabled him to counter this. Perhaps it was nothing more than the tiredness that came from a day’s march without any respite.

  Whatever it was, it nearly cost him his life.

  One moment the one-eyed man was wrapped up in thought, feeling and yet not registering the ground beneath his feet, the next, he was sliding forward as that ground gave way with an unexpected treachery.

  Now the darkness around him made more sense. This was what the people they had been trailing had disappeared into: a fissure in the earth, running deep and almost sheer beneath them. Somehow they had wandered into a small ledge that jutted into space. Those who had gone ahead had known it was there, and had benefited from the light of day. For Ryan and his people there was no prior warning, and as his foot had come down on loose earth and started a slide, the momentum and weight of his body not only threatened to carry him over the edge and into the unknown dark below, but it also carried the risk of making the ledge crumble.

  Krysty and Jak were nearest as Ryan’s leg skidded from under him and he toppled back toward the ground. He would have yelled, if not for the fact that his throat was so cracked that little more than a startled croak would emerge. His arms flew out in an attempt to balance himself and spread his weight, to stop the ground beneath him giving way any more than it already had. Without his realizing it, this gave Jak and Krysty the help they needed. As his arms flew back, they were both able to reach out and grab hold of him.

  Yet even as they did, both were aware of the earth beneath them trembling and starting to crumble. An ominous groan came from deep within the ground beneath their feet.

  Mildred, J.B. and Doc were lagging behind a little. Although it gave them more ground to make up before they could be of assistance, it also gave them the split second they each needed to snap out of their respective reveries and take instant stock of the situation.

  To be too close would be to risk their combined weight causing the unstable ground to break up even more. To stay away would be to leave Jak and Krysty to try to haul Ryan back while the rock splintered beneath their feet. They had to move in and lend support while staying back enough to stop the ledge turning to dust beneath them, and dropping all of them into the abyss below.

  Ryan had no idea of what was happening behind him. He knew only that the ground was falling away beneath him even as he scrabbled with his boot heels to gain some kind of grip. Each frantic attempt to gain a foothold had only the opposite effect. At the same time, he could feel his legs start to slip and his calves cramp as the jagged edge of rock cut into them. At the other end of his body he could feel an ironlike grip around each wrist, and his shoulders strained in their sockets as
he was grabbed and hauled back while his momentum sought to carry him in the opposite direction.

  He stopped kicking, realizing that his efforts were counterproductive.

  At his back, Jak and Krysty could feel the movement beneath them slow as Ryan ceased to fight. Now more confident, but still cautious in case they started a slide of their own, they began to move back slowly, one step at a time. They staggered their steps so that first Krysty, and then Jak, moved, causing the minimum of disturbance and impact to the fragile earth beneath them. Within a few steps, each felt another hand reach out and grab them in the darkness. Mildred took hold of Jak, and Doc assisted Krysty. Each allowed the others to lean a little of their weight into them, so that it took some strain off the ground beneath, and allowed the stress to be carried over a greater area of ground. At the rear, J.B. planted his feet firmly on solid ground and took hold of arms that were stretched out behind Doc and Mildred. Bearing their weight, he began to slowly shuffle back, taking the strain and helping them to haul back Jak and Krysty.

  It was a slow and painful process. Sweating with the effort, despite the chill of the night, J.B. could only relax when he could see, under the wan moon, that Ryan was several yards from the edge, and was able to dig in his own heels and push back.

  When they were all back level with the line of the crevasse, they collapsed onto the ground, breathing hard.

  Ryan raised himself up on one elbow. In the moonlight he could see the inky blackness that was delineated only by the jagged line of collapsing rock. They had hauled him back only just in time. He could still hear the faint sounds of falling dirt and stone where small sections of the lip continued to fall away.