Old Broken Road

by Alexander, K. M.

  “Hannah,” I said, though I was grateful that somebody had said it.

  Shaler stared daggers at Hannah for a few moments and then frowned, crossing her arms to stare at me bitterly.

  “Look, I’d do the same for any of your crew. My first responsibility is the safety of this caravan. My company and yours. I won’t let one of my crew go missing.”

  The company stared at Shaler, waiting. Finally, she relented.

  “Fine. I’ll give you one day. One. That’s all,” she said, throwing up her hands and stomping back to her prairiewain.

  “You heard the lady,” I said, clapping my hands and focusing on the task at hand. “Let’s get to it.”

  EIGHT

  “WE’RE NOT LEAVING.”

  I spat at the ground, hoping that emphasized the point.

  “Wal,” Samantha said, her voice almost a whisper.

  “Carter’s cross!” cursed Shaler. “Your roader up and left! He left. Fled! Couldn’t hack it.”

  Her words were like a slap in the face, and I hope I didn’t flinch. I stared down at the shotgun clutched in my hands. Hannah’s group had found it, stuck among some raspberry bushes beneath a jack pine a hundred yards or so from the camp.

  It was a bit shorter than a typical shotgun. The barrel was cut down so it would work better from the seat of a wain, and its wooden stock was plated in tin with an engraving in Strutten: To my son Ivari. Protect thyself but only as last resort. Love, Father.

  Both barrels were still loaded.

  “I gave you your day and another half-day. I spent another night in this damn laager. By my count, we’ve wasted almost two days on this deserter. Meanwhile, my cargo is rotting! Yesterday we threw out nearly a quarter–wain’s worth. We’re leaving. Today.”

  Glaring back at her, my voice rumbled. “Like hell we are.”

  I could hear her teeth grind as my words came out.

  “Wal. Please,” Samantha said again.

  “You have a job to do,” Shaler said.

  “We have a roader missing,” I said. I wouldn’t let this happen again. Not to Ivari. Not to anyone. Memories of Lovat surfaced, poking through my clouded memory like jagged mountain peaks. Thad, Fran, August. Murdered. So many dead. I wouldn’t let there be another one. I couldn’t.

  “We have a contract, Mister Bell.”

  My fingers tightened around the shotgun, my knuckles pale.

  She didn’t understand. She was reckless. Ivari looked up to me. I was supposed to keep him safe. Didn’t she understand that?

  “Wal!” Samantha nearly shouted. She placed a hand on my chest, and I looked down, seeing the spurs that grew along her knuckles.

  “What?” I said, not sure what else to do. I felt a wetness in the corners of my eyes, and my voice was louder than it should have been.

  “Wal. Step away,” Samantha said, her voice kind, but firm.

  The tension drove the party to silence. Shaler and I stared at each other, both drawing an unspoken line and daring the other to step over it.

  “She’s not worth it, Wal,” Samantha whispered, gently pushing me back.

  Tin’s shotgun still clutched in my hand, I let her lead me away. As we moved from Shaler and the stand-off, my arms began to shake.

  “Here, sit,” said Samantha, easing me down onto a rock next to the smoldering remains of the laager’s central fire. I looked past her, seeing Shaler arguing with her own crew before storming off to her prairiewain. She slammed the door shut and my eyes refocused on Samantha. Anger drained out of me like a leaky canteen.

  Samantha squatted in front of me and met my eyes. Her dark hair was buried under her keff, but her large brown eyes locked me in.

  “You okay?”

  I tried to look away. I had lost control.

  “Lovat wasn’t your fault. You know that, right?”

  I blinked, surprised. At once, I felt closer to her than ever, but also naked and exposed. I said nothing.

  She leaned close to me. I could smell her. A mix of coffee, incense, road dust, and fresh flowers. “All of it was Peter Black’s fault. You had no idea—how could you? He manipulated everyone. You know that. You fixed it.”

  “But—”

  “No. No more. You miss your friends. Fine. You’re angry. Okay. You took care of it. You took care of it. It's done.”

  “I hardly remember doing any of—”

  “You took care of it…” said a new voice. Wensem. He stood behind Samantha, his lanky frame silhouetted by the flat gray sky. “…and you saved me and my boy in the process.”

  He folded his long limbs to squat down next to Samantha.

  “You’re a good man, you care for your people. Hell, you force yourself to memorize the name of every wain driver and caravan guard in the party, even though your memory is terrible.”

  I chuckled. It was a pitiful, wet sound, but it felt good.

  “Ivari is gone,” Wensem said. “I don’t like it any more than you.”

  I envied his calm. His strength. I felt like a failure. I needed to protect my crew, and I had lost one of them.

  My mouth dropped open in protest, but Wensem held up a finger. “Wait. No. Close that yapping mouth for a second and listen, dammit. You know he’s gone. Logically, you know this. By the Firsts, we’re all upset by it, but we did our best, we looked everywhere. He’s gone. We could stay here wondering, or we could move on and get out of here before someone else gets abducted.”

  “You think he was taken?” Samantha asked.

  I nodded. The idea had haunted me most of the day. It was the only answer that made sense. Boots here. Gear here. Shotgun taken, probably the only thing he had been able to grab. Whatever had taken him had been efficient and quiet. Hannah’s gargoyles were at the top of my short list of suspects. Whatever caused the sound was next. They were probably connected. Wensem was right, we needed to move on.

  “Bell Caravans doesn’t leave a man behind,” I said, but the fight had gone out of me.

  “We’re not leaving him behind. The trail is cold, there’s nothing more we can do,” Wensem said, not unkindly. “Our best bet is to press on, and hope we find something to lead us to him later.”

  “All right,” I said, rising and dusting nonexistent dust off my jeans. My mind struggled to come to terms with leaving Tin’s disappearance unsolved. “All right.”

  I turned to face the huddled mass of the caravan company and raised my voice. “Let’s pack ’em up! We have half a day of light left, and I’d like to see six miles before the sun sets.”

  That night, the noise came again.

  NINE

  SLEEP DIDN'T COME. I was too restless. I sat under a tarpaulin near the edge of the laager, keeping my eyes off the fire. I wanted them to remain adjusted to the darkness. If someone tried taking any of my people again, I would be able to spot them coming. I’d stop them.

  The noise hung in the sky for about half the night. Wavering up from over the hills and cascading across the laager like a demon song. We endured it. The oxen bellowed. Men and women whimpered in their bedrolls. I realized how wrong I had been, suggesting this sound was anything natural, anything like the King Tide. This was much darker.

  Eventually the sound died when the green moon hit its apex, its lurid light casting a morose hex over the camp. It deepened the shadows, and made it harder to see what was going on along the periphery.

  Bodies moved about with each shift. I started with every cough and scratch. I clasped the handle of my Judge in a white-knuckled grip, its chambers loaded and ready.

  The sunrise surprised me. Had I slept? The evening had become a long blur of minutes that melted into each other, creating a knot of time that was difficult to unravel. The morning was eerily quiet compared to the thunderous noise the previous evening. I stalked around the camp, counting the company. One. Two. Three. Four… a spike of panic when I couldn’t find the fourth, a sigh of relief when he was found under a pile of blankets. My counting continued. Five, Six… and on until th
e entire company was accounted for.

  No one had fled.

  No one had left.

  No one had been taken.

  I turned and watched a pack of shamblers skulk over the distant hill, my arms hanging down my sides in a subconscious mimicry of their bearing. The pack was moving slowly in the direction of Meyer's Falls. I envied them.

  I resumed my patrol around the laager, feeling as mindless as the shamblers seemed. As I passed the chuckwain, Taft stopped me, her mouth downturned in a rare frown.

  “You didn’t sleep,” she said, hands on her immense hips. Wearing an apron, she extended a wooden spatula awkwardly at me, like a small branch from a massive tree.

  “I got a little,” I said.

  She stared at me for a while before asking, “You hungry?”

  “Always,” I admitted, turning back and mentally counting the company again.

  All here.

  All minus Tin.

  I slept little over the next week and a half. When I did sleep, the nightmares would return. The same images repeated again and again. Yellow demonic faces, hooded figures among shadowed ruins, and always that solitary man in red. Always him.

  Days ran into one another. My mind fogged up with lack of sleep; coffee was no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Wheels clunked over rough ill-kept roads and jolted me back into reality whenever I lapsed into unconsciousness. The unusual heat stuck with us, and the sharp cloying scent of weary, sweating bodies hung about in the evenings. This autumn trip felt more like a mid-summer excursion.

  I surrendered myself to routine. My nightly vigil. The morning walk around the laager to count the company, making sure all were there and none were taken. The day’s steady travel. Repeat.

  We had one wain driver run off, a guy named Wilkins. Pot-bellied and big as a barrel, he just jumped off his wain and sprinted away, hollering about the end of the world. Wensem and I had run him down, tackling him, trying to hold him until he calmed down. He bit at us like a wild thing. Raked his claws across Wensem’s back, tried to gouge my eyes.

  “He has come!” he yelled, his eyes bulging from his sockets, a wide grin splitting his lips. “He has come. He is horrible. Horrible beyond anything you can imagine—but wonderful….”

  It hadn’t worked. Eventually he thrashed so much that we let him go. Watched him leap up and run off toward Meyer’s Falls. Away from the column, away from his post, away from that awful noise.

  “Can’t you hear him?” he screamed before disappearing over the edge of the hillside. “He calls to you!”

  We shifted duties after losing Wilkins. Samantha offered to take over driving his wain while Wensem took up Tin's duties driving the gearwain at the head of the column. The Lytle twins split their duties between the left and right side. Meanwhile I trudged up and down its length, hobbling between wains, checking on the crew and making sure everyone was awake, alert, had their weapons loaded and was ready for whatever might come.

  The noise came and went, splitting the sky and hanging with us like an evening storm, then silencing late in the evening, leaving headaches and frayed nerves. A horrific accompaniment. During the few nights of silence no one mentioned it, afraid that talking about the noise would summon it.

  In her scouting, Hannah spotted the hooded gargoyles only twice after Tin’s disappearance. Both times more distant, black smudges under pines that vanished when they realized her eyes were on them.

  At the halfway point we made camp in the ruins of an ancient town atop a hill. The land here was rolling, dry earth. The beginnings of foothills rose before us in the west. From our perch we were high enough to see the Victory wall to the north. A tidy gray line, etched across the tawny hills. We had been following its path west since Meyer's Falls, running a parallel route just thirty miles to its south.

  The noise hadn’t come that evening, so the whole company relaxed a little. We circled the wains into laager and made camp.

  After a supper of the last of the salt pork and stewed black beans, seven of us sat around the campfire passing a bottle of rye that Hannah had generously offered. Samantha, Taft, Wensem, Hannah, and I were joined by Rousseau, the cargowain driver, and Charron the blacksmith. Unlike previous nights, the conversation came easily. No one wanted to talk about the noise, preferring anything that could serve as a distraction.

  “Never seen the wall before,” said Hannah. “It’s big.”

  “You should’ve seen them build the damn thing! Folks came from miles around and watched—from a distance, of course. They had soldiers walking the whole line of it. No one from the south could get close,” said Taft.

  “You saw it built?” asked Charron, brushing her long hair out of her face. I hadn’t had much chance to interact with the hired smithy. She was about my age, mid-thirties. She was mixed-race, human-dimanian her skin the color of coffee with plenty of cream added. Small nubs of horns sprouted from her forehead, elbows, and knuckles, like Samantha, but they were smaller than those of a typical dimanian. She was plain-featured and pleasant. And Carter’s cross, was she good with a hammer. It was nice to see her interacting with the rest of the company. I hoped she would work out. A lot of the big importers used iron and steel cargowains, so having a good smith in a caravan meant we could take some of the more lucrative contracts.

  Taft laughed. “Honey, I’m old as the damn hills. Yeah, I saw it get built. Hell, I was part of the reason it went up in the first place!”

  “You were in the Syringa militia,” I surmised. I knew Taft had a good thirty years on me, but I had no idea she had been a soldier. Hadn't pegged her as the type, to be honest.

  Taft grunted and pawed at her chin with a thick hand. “A past life. Yes, I was in the Syringan militia. Enlisted when I was just a kid. Wasn’t in it very long, mind you.”

  “Why did you leave?” asked Samantha.

  “I was a member of General William Bowles’ own brigade. I was at Crowsnest.”

  “You’re kidding,” said Rousseau, hissing as he drew his narrow lips together tightly.

  “Crowsnest?” asked Samantha, confused. “What’s that?”

  “Don’t they teach you about the Territories in Lovat?” asked Taft with a wide smile.

  “Aren’t you a professor?” I asked.

  Samantha rolled her eyes and punched me in the shoulder. “Religious studies don’t include Syringan history. Never heard of Crowsnest.”

  Hannah chuckled. “In Lovat, we call it Bowles’ Folly.”

  Taft gave the scout a sour expression and put her hand on one of her sizable knees. “Hand me that bottle, Hannah, before I wallop you.”

  Hannah grinned and passed the whiskey to the cook.

  “Before Crowsnest, Victory was a very different place. They had a standing army, sure, but they were mainly woodsmen, farmers, trappers, and traders. Peaceful enough. There were caravan runs deep into their territory. I'll bet your old man knows companies who did runs through Victory, Wal.” Taft nodded at me and passed the whiskey.

  I took a swig and nodded.

  She continued. “The circuits ran to a handful of small cities, enough they could support trade and keep a few companies profitable.

  “Occasionally Victory forces and ours would cross paths and get in a tussle, but overall Victory had little to do with Syringa.”

  “Victory’s capital is Empress,” I said, interjecting. “On an island to the north and west, off-shore from Lovat. You can still take a ferry there, though apparently Victory is very careful about who they let in.”

  “It’s the only open port,” said Rousseau.

  Taft took a swig of the rye and continued. “Syringa has a history of iron rattling. It’s the smallest city in the Territories and little more than a trail stop between Hellgate and Lovat. It makes the Syringans ornery. I’d wager their aggression is them trying to assert themselves politically, pretend they’re one of the big players.”

  Hannah chuckled. She never liked Syringa. Born and raised in Lovat, she had a bit of
disdain for the smaller city. Referred to them as yokels.

  “Well, about thirty-five years ago, Syringa was on the offensive again. Before any of you were born I’d imagine, your company excluded, Wensem.”

  She nodded at him, and he smiled a crooked smile and nodded back.

  “Anyway, I was just a little thing then, skinny as a rail if you can believe it! I was serving in the Syringa militia like my old man did. Even joined the same outfit—Company A, Syringa Militia, under General Bowles.”

  “So why the aggression?” asked Samantha, her curiosity piqued. She drew her knees up to her chest.

  “If I remember correctly, the Syringan Council wanted to claim more land for the city. The valleys controlled by Victory to the north were rich, fertile land. Perfect for farms and ranches, and the mountains were full of mines. I suppose with the land being so close to Syringa and so far from Empress, Syringa didn’t see how Victory could really lay claim to it.”

  “Wasn’t Victory an independent nation before the Aligning?” asked Hannah.

  Taft shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know much about that. It’s just myth and legend to me. All I know is Victory claimed it, and Syringa wanted it. The strategy to claim the valleys centered on Crowsnest.”

  “Where’s Crowsnest?” I asked.

  “If it’s still around, isn’t far from here. It's a border town. Or it was. I suppose that’s why I’m gettin' all nostalgic.”

  “That, and the rye!” Hannah laughed.

  Taft waved her off. “About halfway between Syringa and Lovat, then north.” She gestured towards the wall. “If a force could take Crowsnest and march north you’d effectively cut Victory in half.”

  “So, what happened?” asked Samantha, staying on track. “I mean, Hannah said Lovatines call it Bowles’ Folly. I assume it didn’t end well for Syringa.”

  “That’s putting it mildly. The problem was Crowsnest was an army town and a large garrison was stationed there—a direct assault would have been nearly impossible. So Bowles had this bright idea and he selected Company A to do it.