by Kaelyn Ross
“I still don’t like being here.”
“We won’t be for long,” Aiden said, leading her to a enormous, circular green. Cracked brickwork paved its edge, and the overgrown grassy center was dotted with stone benches resting under old, hoary trees. A quick glance told her the green was easily twice as large as her village. It seemed that everything about the old world had been huge.
At the center of the green stood a tall metal statue of a stern-faced man looking east. Webs of greenish corrosion covered every inch of him, along with generous splatters of bird droppings on his shoulders and head. A few of the offending birds in question, half a dozen pigeons, cooed and shifted on his shoulders. They were cautious of the two intruders, but not overly frightened. Kestrel wondered if they had seen people here before. If so, who? Brow knotting, she cast a suspicious eye on her brother.
“You’ve come here before, haven’t you?”
He started, as if he had not expected her to guess his secret. His face smoothed, and he stopped under a weeping willow, it hanging bows brushing one of the stone benches. “Several times. Now, until I get back, stay here.”
“Where are you going?” Kestrel demanded, failing to hide her unease that he was planning to leave her.
“Don’t worry, little sister. You’ll be safe … unless any bears are about to catch the scent of that bloody bundle you’re carrying.”
Kestrel hugged her prize a little closer. It was beginning to smell ripe. “I’m not afraid of bears.”
Aiden flashed a smile that was only about half as scornful as usual. “Then sit down and rest. I’ll be back soon.”
“You still haven’t told me where you’re going.”
“You’ll know soon enough,” he said, dropping his knapsack on the ground near the bench. With that, he trotted away.
She watched him until he vanished into a patch of thick bracken and ferns growing between a pair of broken gray buildings on the far side of the green.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Kestrel drained most of her waterskin before taking a seat on the bench, its stone edges softened by time. It was surprisingly comfortable. So comfortable that she could not resist stretching out and looking up at the sky. The longer she rested there, the farther away her fears soared, and she was able to close her eyes and doze.
She came awake after what felt like just a few minutes, and saw that Aiden had returned. He was stuffing something into his knapsack. She had never seen such a device, but for some reason it sparked a faint memory.
Kestrel sat up and, for a moment, the world spun around her. “What is that?” she asked after the spinning ceased, and armed her sweat-slicked brow. The fever had come back stronger, and she was thirstier than ever. That worried her, because sometimes the worst sicknesses came in waves, each wave stronger than the last. Home was a long way away, and to feel this miserable made that journey seem insurmountable.
Aiden drew what he was holding back out of the pack. “It’s a weapon,” he said in a reverent hush.
Kestrel croaked a laugh. She knew weapons—bows and spears, axes and knives—but what he held looked like nothing more than a piece of old junk, something that even Fat Will, the village blacksmith, would deem useless.
Aiden scowled. “It is a weapon,” he insisted, holding it up. It was made of black metal with worn areas along prominent edges that gleamed dull gray. The curved grip seemed built to fit into the palm, just as he was holding it, and the other end, a tapered cylinder with long ridges running along its length, all glowing with a sickly green light, stretched a foot or more from his hand.
As Kestrel studied it, she realized why it was so familiar. “It’s a….” she searched for the word she had once heard, “….a pistol.” There was something more she was missing, something she had found frightening as a little girl when listening to tales around the village green, but she could not remember.
“Yes!” Aiden said, jumping to his feet. She had never seen him let his guard down enough to show so much excitement. “A firelance pistol. Watch this,” he said, bowing his head over the weapon with a disconcerting familiarity. He flipped a small lever on the side, pointed it at the statue, and slowly squeezed another lever on the underside of the firelance.
Not a lever, Kestrel thought, as a powerful image filled her mind of One-Ear Tom’s grizzled face washed in firelight as he declared in somber tones, The hounds of war squeezed the triggers of their firelances, and brought forth the thunders of Hell from their barrels.…
Eyes widening in alarm, Kestrel looked back to her brother, saw his grimace of anticipation as his finger tightened on the trigger. She recoiled in preparation of some roaring—
The weapon made an insignificant clicking noise.
Kestrel let out a shuddering breath. The sweat on her brow now had nothing to do with fever.
Aiden lowered the weapon, a scowl knotting his features. “What’s wrong with this thing?”
He fiddled with the lever on the side again, and then Kestrel heard a mosquito-like whine. Smiling now, Aiden lifted the firelance once more. This time when he pulled the trigger, the weapon bucked in his hand, and a whooshing pulse of something—to Kestrel it looked like a fist-sized ball of shimmering air—erupted from the end of the barrel, streaked across the park, and slammed against the head of the statue with a small cracking noise that sent the pigeons winging into the sky, seemingly unhurt.
Impressive, she considered, but hardly the thunders of Hell. For a weapon that was supposedly so deadly, it seemed rather harmless.
Aiden appeared to share her opinion. “That’s not right,” he muttered, fiddling with the side lever again. The mosquito whine was louder this time, and cycling higher. With an almost offhanded gesture, he aimed at the statue and squeezed the trigger.
The second blast, this one tinged like green fire, hit the statue with a thudding roar that ripped through the park, and sent Kestrel diving under the bench, her hands cupped over her ears.
When she dared open her eyes, she saw a cloud of acrid dust drifting away from the statue—rather, what was left of it. Half of it was simply gone. The other half, a twisted, smoky wreckage from the waist down, leaned sharply on its stone pedestal.
Aiden loosed an excited whoop and danced in a circle, looking like a little boy. She had never seen him behave that way, and that unnerved her almost as much as the thought of roaming spirits. He composed himself quickly, but the image remained in her mind, one part endearing, and one part oddly terrifying.
“What do you mean to do with that thing?” Kestrel asked. Kill Stone Dogs and Black Ears, he would say. What else?
But he did not say that at all.
Aiden squared his shoulders. “I will lead a raid against the Tall Ones.”
“What?” she demanded, sure the ringing in her ears had made her misunderstand.
“Every old city I’ve explored has hidden vaults filled with firelances—pistols and rifles.”
“How many of the old cities have you explored?”
He went on as if she had not spoken. “Some of the vaults hold machines of old, though they look new-made. Hundreds, Kes, maybe thousands of them! But I don’t need those machines. With a few of these,” he finished, brandishing the firelance, “we can destroy the Tall Ones.”
Kestrel’s eyes bulged. “Are you mad?” she blurted, getting to her feet. “Why would you attack the Tall Ones?”
“Because they shelter behind their walls, little sister, with no worry of attack. They prowl the darkest nights, and carry away the unwary. Their presence alone fills strong hearts with distress, but I say we should fear this mysterious enemy no more.” He spoke with the same veiled dread she always heard when someone mentioned the Tall Ones. But there was something more in his voice, something she had heard from him before, but could not quite recognize.
“Those are all good reasons why they should remain untroubled,” she cautioned.
He shook his head, denying her advice. “I want to learn if they are evil s
pirits, as One-Ear Tom says. I want to learn what devilry they are hiding, discover what powers they wield. These are the things I will find out. And whatever keeps them safe, we will take for ourselves, and use to keep our people safe.”
When he said I will find out, his voice cracking with conviction, she remembered that he had sounded the same way on the day he told their parents he would become the youngest Red Hand ever, and again when he proclaimed that he would become the youngest warchief. In the end, he had been right, but no one had ever doubted him. The way he sounded now, the way he looked, his eyes hard and cold as ice, told her he wanted more than his words suggested. But what more is there?
Aiden stepped close, caught her shoulders, and glared into her eyes as if she were his enemy. “Say nothing about any of this. Do you understand?”
Kestrel hid the wince of pain as his fingers clamped tighter on her shoulders, and nodded.
He held her stare for a long, dreadful minute. “Good. Now, let’s get you home. Your fever seems to be getting worse.” He flashed a thin, loveless smirk. “I couldn’t live with myself if my little sister died in my care.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Kill, a soggy mess of skin and bone, blood and fur, filled Kestrel’s nose with a fearsome reek. It seemed to gain weight with every step she took, until it felt as if she were carrying a bundle of heavy stones. More troubling, her fever was savaging her like a starving predator. One minute she was shaking with cold, the next burning. As the forest began to thin and the steepness of the mountains gave way to rugged hills dotted with scrub brush, an intrusive exhaustion sank deeper into her mind, until she felt snared inside an unsettling dream where neither the world nor its colors were as they should be.
Doggedly, Kestrel put one foot in front of the other, refusing to complain. She snatched handfuls of berries where she found them, crammed them into her mouth, chewed and swallowed. She felt no hunger, and the berries tasted sour, but she had to eat to keep her strength up. As well, she drank deeply from her waterskin, hoping it would not run dry before they reached the river.
Aiden held silent along the march, but he occasionally favored her with his usual disdainful looks. She ignored him. It was easy to do. That way she felt, he might have been a ghost guiding her along.
Dusk had fallen by the time they came to the river, a concrete canal a mile wide and two hundred feet deep. The sloping sides had stairways that led down to deeper pathways, until reaching the water far below.
Her people told that the Ancestors directed the streams flowing off the mountains into this canal, which in turn fed smaller canals. It was said that the world was covered in such canals, moving water from one place to another as needed, eliminating worry over drought. No one knew if canals actually covered the world, but if you followed them long enough, they all eventually led to the impassible boundary of the Dead Lands.
Kestrel knew many such stories of the Ancestors’ genius. Stories of how they had tamed the world by eradicating war and famine; how they had survived ages of ice, when the sun stopped giving its light and heat, and the seas froze, and the mountains became trapped under snow. And when the sun burned too bright and too hot, scorching the land, they had persevered and even flourished by building the canals.
Yes, she knew the stories, but the one that always stayed with her was that of the Ancestors’ demise.
Although the they had found ways to stave off sickness and death, and so were able to live lives measured in hundreds of years, the pestilence named the Red Fever devoured them as fire devours straw, leaving their mighty works and machines to churn on and on, until they exhausted the unknowable fuel that drove them, or their metal insides of gears and cogs and springs simply ground themselves into dust.
“So much lost … so much forgotten,” Kestrel murmured, gazing with glassy eyes at the water below, running placid but swift. Every turning of the moon the river flooded, whether it was in the middle of summer or the heart of winter, and the roaring flow would climb almost to the top edge of the canal, scouring it clean.
“What?” Aiden asked, his tone sharp.
“But not everything is lost,” Kestrel said, feeling at once heavy and light, somehow separate from herself, and yet at the same time buried so deeply within herself that nothing else existed. She smiled wanly. “The ghosts of yesterday still work to keep the river clean. At least we still have that.”
Aiden squinted a thoughtful eye at her. “Your fever is getting worse.”
Kestrel stared down at the water, wondering if it was cool enough to steal the boiling heat from her blood. “A bath would be nice.”
“Kes?”
She took a shaky, swaying step toward a set of stairs.
“Kestrel!” Aiden snapped, lurching towards her.
She dodged out of reach. “You cannot help me! You shouldn’t have helped me. I’m a Red Hand!”
He lifted his hands. “Then go drown yourself, if that’s what you want.”
“Just a bath,” she muttered, struggling to keep her balance on the concrete steps, wondering at the hands—or had it been machines?—that had built them.
She made it down the first flight, paused to catch her breath on the walkway running off in either direction, then continued.
Halfway down the second set of steps, she passed out of slanting red sunlight and into twilight shadow. It was cooler down in the dark, but the memory of the day’s warmth radiated off the smooth gray surfaces. A breeze brought with it the mossy smell of the river.
Kestrel stopped again at the next walkway and looked back the way she had come. The sky, now purple, vaulted above her, but Aiden was nowhere in sight. Had he decided to leave without her? If so, that was fine. She did not need his help, nor did she want it.
Kestrel began down the third flight of stairs, and stiffened between one step and the next, arms held out as she tottered between keeping her balance and falling headlong down the stairs. Before her hung a distorted image of herself. She slowly thrust her head forward, stunned, and saw her mouth yawn impossibly wide in the curved surface. It took a few seconds for her to understand that she was looking into a hovering spherical mirror.
It’s not real, she thought. It can’t be.
But it was, and it was coming closer.
By now, a series of rippling rings were spreading across the smooth surface, making her reflection waver and wobble. From the spot where the ripples originated, a long needle eased out of the sphere.
Kestrel drew back, not daring to breathe. A faint clicking noise came from the sphere, followed by a hum, and then more clicks.
Faster than she could react, the needle shot forward and stabbed the center of her forehead. She reeled drunkenly, her skull ringing as if Fat Will had hit her with one of his hammers. Bursts of light flared and sizzled before her eyes, blotting out everything else.
Aiden called out, seemingly miles away.
“Help me!” Kestrel shrieked, dropping the bundled lion hide and raising her hands for balance. The lights burning across her vision became explosions of crimson, and the ringing agony in her skull deepened, flowed down into her spine like molten metal. Her limbs began to jitter.
“Kes?”
“HELP ME!”
“Stay there! I’m coming!”
Kestrel tried to hold still, but it was as if her body had been invaded by a nest of writhing serpents. Her skin burned and itched and crawled. She screamed again, eyes bulging sightlessly.
Aiden called out once more, but his voice was receding.
She was falling. Falling and tumbling down the side of the canal. Down and down and down.
Blackness followed, but did not last.
She found herself looking up at the outline of a bird wheeling through the darkening sky. Then Aiden’s face was hovering over hers, blocking out everything else. He was saying something, but she could not hear him. She tried to answer, but her throat had quit working.
And then Aiden began to disappear under seething waves of gr
ay-black flowers, and she felt herself slipping away, suffocating.
She fell into a nightmare filled with fiery pain and swirling images, a place where time had no meaning. Every time she blinked, she saw something different.
Once she saw the night sky, dusted with a sweep of brilliant stars. The next time she opened her eyes, the soft golden light of dawn had come, but she was looking down at one of the smooth concrete walkways lining the sides of the canal. Aiden’s heels flashed, one after the other, in and out of her line of sight. There was a painful pressure in her middle, as she bounced with his every stride. He’s carrying me, she thought with dazed amazement … and drifted away.
She opened her eyes and it was full dark again. Aiden was standing in front of her, shoving some bulbous, smelly bundle into her hands.
My Kill, she thought dully. It was so heavy now, and so large that she could barely wrap her arms around it. Kestrel almost let it fall, but a second thought made her hold it tight. I must keep it safe.
He spun her around. “Go, Kes,” he whispered against her ear. “Go home. You know the way. And remember, say nothing of the old city. For your life, Kes, remember that, and go home.” He shoved her forward.
And away she went, staggering, tripping, falling, getting up time and again along a familiar trail. The way home.
Her skin burned; her bones felt cracked and charred. The smell of pine sap and evergreen boughs filled her nose, and she wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep. Instead, she walked into an enveloping black curtain, hearing her brother’s whisper: Go home … home … home.
When last she opened her eyes, Kestrel was again looking straight up. Dark tree branches blocked out most of the stars. She blinked, and then there were a dozen faces staring down at her; hungry faces made freakish and sinister by dancing firelight.
