Chapter Eight
In the high cloistered dormitory, a group of new boys crowds around the thin window, squeezing together in a heap and craning their necks to see the action unfold on the grounds. They watch breathlessly as the unconscious man is dragged across the garden, his leg bent wickedly askew. When the eruption began, they had thought with heartbreaking naiveté that perhaps someone had come to rescue them.
Calyn huddles with her husband in their cottage, his fighting days long since gone, and they look out their own small window at the goings-on. They invoke the spirits of the Beyond and whisper devotions to their King’s divine protection—swearing off the Rain of Fire and saying their due should it all come crashing down.
Jeneth holds little Mariset close and rocks her gently. Eriem escorted them to Sena’s cottage to stay through the night, before suiting himself up and joining the hunt. Sena wraps an arm around each toddler and they sit in silence, gazing up at the ceiling as if waiting for a squall to pass. Such is the way across the hillside, frightened denizens cowering in darkened rooms, waiting for the spark that will ignite their downfall.
As the night grows quiet they venture out to see that their Temple is not burning, that whatever trouble had assailed them is dealt with and all crises apparently averted. The unsettled men keep watch through the dark hours, pacing the grounds and chattering nervously about the unknown origins of these intruders, speculating as to their intentions and wherewithal. They look to the Temple’s crown and whisper solemn wishes that their sacred protections have not been revoked.
Arana watches from above, silent and still. All candlelight around him has been extinguished and he stands in darkness, frozen in place since the chaos began. His breath is racing and he attempts to control it, his mind a swirl of confused thoughts. No premonition has foretold the arrival of these midnight prowlers, no vision or wisp of vision, nothing to portend the events he has just witnessed with his own sparkling spirit eyes. He opens himself as a willing vessel and bades the forces lingering in his very blood to show themselves.
The night answers with silence.
On shaky legs he snakes down to the underground keep, steadying his hand along the wall, averting the concerned looks of the men that escort him. In the antechamber he hears the suffering of the chained prisoners, and when he passes the heavy keep door he sees them—one old, one young. Ropy strings of drool hang from their mouths, their bodies covered with welts and lacerations, and Keslin stands to the back, ministering new abuses for his men to perform.
“Who are they?” Arana asks.
“Trying to find out,” Keslin says, flushing with exhilaration. “They won’t speak a word. Found them just past the tree line. Spying on us.”
“Spying?”
Keslin hands over the parchment. Arana unfolds it and stares in terrified wonderment at the finely sketched layout of the Temple and surrounding provinces. Bold letters inked across the top read NEZRA.
His blood runs cold. An interminable silence passes as Arana looks from parchment to prisoners and back again.
“We can add two horses to the stable,” Keslin says optimistically. “They were tied a ways back in the woods. Here’s the rest of their things—we’ve been through it… this little drawing is all we’ve found.”
The clothing is scattered across the back of the keep. Arana sifts through the garments numbly, casting aside the boots and packs and belts and toolkits. He picks up a torn jacket and lays it out flat. There is something disturbingly familiar about the odd tailoring—the seam line at the shoulders, the tapered cut. It has been years, not since his childhood days, but he has seen craftwork like this before.
Frantic footsteps rush down the stairs and a breathless sentry bursts into the keep and shatters the stillness.
“We finished our head count,” he says, panting. “We’re missing two.”
“Who?”
“One girl gone from her room, and the east guard is not at his station.”
They blink around at one another, dumbstruck, until all eyes eventually settle on the King. He tries to form a sentence but his dry, clumsy tongue forbids him and his jaw simply drops open and hangs slack.
Keslin is the first to move. He advances on the prisoners and wrings his hands around Renning’s neck, crunching his crooked old thumbs into his windpipe.
“If you’ve hurt them…” he seethes. Renning’s eyes bulge in confusion and his face turns a deeper shade of purple. He releases Renning and clutches onto Ethan. “Or maybe it was you? You’ve already killed one of ours. Where are they?”
Ethan’s head lolls to the side and he mumbles unintelligible nonsense. Keslin grabs a stout length of wood from a pile and slams it into his broken leg. Ethan’s eyes sharpen to fine points and he wails so fiercely the sound carries up the stairs and into the foyer, resonating through the whole structure like an enormous woodwind. His cries shrivel away and he passes out again, his shocked body quivering and rattling his shackles.
“He killed… one of ours?” Arana asks. “Here? At the Temple?”
“On the bluffs. Braylon’s body is upstairs.”
Arana’s mind reels.
“Let’s go,” says Keslin, already lurching toward the stairs.
They break for the upper levels and run to the vaulted overpass that connects the Temple with the dormitory, then fan out down the off-shooting corridors with Keslin charging after, shouting orders.
Arana walks to the center of the high bridge and looks out across the calm waters of the reflecting pool, his consummate protections come to naught, his lifelong streak of Temple harmony shattered to pieces—the evidence of his failure lying on a cold slab in the Temple morgue.
Almost immediately a frenzy of hollers from the furthest corner draws him away and he strides down the hall toward the warriors collected at the narrow service entrance. A path is cleared for Arana and Keslin and the stifled moaning from behind the pantry door quickens their pace. They arrive just as the door is battered once more, busting the wood plank at the hinges and throwing it open with a loud crack.
Bound and disoriented on the floor is their missing sentry, his scalp coated with dried blood and his mouth muzzled with rope.
When he’s undone he sits for a moment and takes several long, deep breaths. Then he pours forth. Arana listens in stunned silence as the account unfolds, his pulse throbbing in his eardrums. The heaviness deepens when they find the soggy torch in the sink and the cabinet of knives standing wide open, with two slots empty.
As dawn breaks, Jack and Lia push forward. They ran through the night and they run still, holding hands so tightly their knuckles have turned white. At streams they stop and fill the waterskin, and along the way they pluck berries and a few less desirable things to chew on as they flee through the dense underbrush.
Jack looks behind for any sign of the Nezra, or anything else that might be stalking them, for the forests are teeming with carnivores. It’s clear as far as he can see and they carry on. They follow the map and keep the coast to their right hand side, and as they make more ground their panic and fear turn slowly into exultation.
A rough, dizzying climb takes them to a high tableland that overlooks the coastal cliffs far to the south and north, a landscape so prehistoric and majestic that for a moment they forget their worries and gape like mystified newborns at the wild, unknown frontier. Sun-dappled mesas recede off into the luminescent haze, rolling and cresting, the product of untold aeons of the earth’s churning. The cliffs drop off sheer down into the yawning ocean, which spills out so far and wide that Jack and Lia feel at once minuscule and enormous, like tiny sprites standing on the shoulder of some ancient god.
They come together, and if one could amplify this sight to the finest grain it would be impossible to perceive which of them moved first to embrace the other.
“Jack, we made it!”
As they cling to each other, the years they spent in exile fall away and they pick up easily, despite all that has passed, and even though she is a new Lia, and he knows that he is a new Jack, it is as though they were never separated. The moment lingers and the elixirs of the wild seep into their worn souls and they feel something dry and brittle begin to crack open.
As they part, Jack looks along the northern coast and off in the faraway he sees the smoke of the Temple.
“We have to keep moving,” he says, “they’ll know we’re gone by now.”
Down the hill they run, into the emerald green hollow, dots of red and purple wildflowers blooming around them. A few unnatural shapes jut from the earth at odd angles, vestigial remnants of a world they never knew. They stay clear of open spaces when they can, using the ivy-covered slabs of old stone as cover in case any mounted searchers rise over the plateau behind them. Jack peers through a few intact windows at the decomposing scrap metal arranged inside—a dreary tableau of loss and ruin, home now to things that slither and crawl.
A stream runs through the fold of the valley, a mossy boulevard of burbling water and glossy stones, and he guides Lia down to its thin bank.
“Here, take off your boots.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Let’s walk upstream awhile and cross over, maybe we can cover our scent. They’ll have the wolves after us and we can’t move fast enough to outrun ‘em.”
Lia needs no further motivation—she sits on the bank and pulls off her stiff leather boots and steps into the bracing stream. She sinks into the mud. The soft putty feels good between her tired toes and the cool water washes over her feet. Jack walks a false trail off the other side of the stream then shuffles backwards and splashes in behind Lia and they trek along against the lazy current. The foliage thickens as they move inland and the bows of green-leafed oak trees sway languidly above them, shading them from the midday sun and giving cover from the high ground.
Jack clambers up a low, rocky waterfall and Lia scales up behind him. They step carefully around collected limbs and branches and slosh through deepening water, rising almost to their knees. Jack looks hungrily at the slippery trout that mingle around the stream and dart and scatter as their footsteps plunk down in the mud. He makes futile snatches at a couple of them and they slip lithely from his fingertips and race away.
His movements are slowing. They need rest. Neither of them has slept since the night before and exhaustion is setting in.
When the coast is gone from view they leave the stream and sit wiping the mud off their feet with fallen leaves, then lie back on the sloping bank and let the sun dry them, feeling like they could pass right out and sleep the whole day through. They tie their boots on and hike through the woods until they find an outcropping of boulders.
Jack grabs a thick branch and sweeps away a corner, looking for snake holes and other things that might intrude upon them. He’d rather make more distance but his thoughts aren’t clear and their pace has slowed to a crawl. They scatter nettles and dry leaves, then nestle back in the enclave and pull more branches up around them. It’s not much, but it is enough, and as they sink into the matting and curl together, sleep steals them quick.
Halis sits atop his horse at the edge of the summit that borders the Temple’s lush gardens, looking out over the senescent valley with the straight-backed posture of regal austerity. He grins with slow malice. His face is a mask of lopsided disfigurement. Six other riders await their orders next to him, called to find the runaways. The wolfmongrels snarl and gnash against their leathery leads, flicking their golden brown eyes around with icy cleverness, and the mounted wranglers struggle to hold them back.
Keslin walks down the line and inspects each member of the search brigade—seven mongrels, seven horsemen. They wear looks of hard-set resolution. Keslin’s own visage is grim from the further revelations that first light had brought. The rope dangling over the edge of the bluffs, the sooted handprints along the Temple’s outer walls—and the perplexity of Braylon’s body found with no boots or weapons has seemingly explained itself—the prisoners in the keep can at least be exonerated of murder.
Keslin steps to the front of the brigade and addresses them. “Kill the boy, return the girl. Separate if you lose the scent. Do not return until you’ve found them.” He gives a nod and they set forth, hauling off after the snapping wolfmongrels.
The grounds are largely empty save for them. Most stay inside, behind barred doors, lest there be any more outsiders conducting spywork in the forest. He hobbles back toward the Temple, silver blood coursing through his veins. Arana and Ezbeth wait under the portico in the center of the enormous entryway, watching keenly as the horsemen and wolfmongrels descend from view.
“How long will it take?” Arana asks, just as Keslin is mounting the grand staircase.
“Not long. They couldn’t have gone far on foot.”
Arana nods disconsolately. “Lock these,” he tells the sentry after Keslin enters the foyer. They swing the towering doors shut with a hollow boom and throw the bars across.
“It’s risky to leave the girl alive,” says Keslin. “She could corrupt the others.”
“She won’t have the chance—she’ll bear for me and she can spend her last nine months in the pit.”
Ezbeth flinches.
“Well…” Keslin grimaces and scratches at his armpit. “About the others… I worry about them.”
“How so?” asks Ezbeth.
“If one can run, so can the rest.”
“I don’t think it should be a problem,” she says. “They’re very well behaved.”
“That’s what we thought about these two. You can’t tame out their instincts entirely. How do you know this isn’t the beginning? What if they’ve sworn some kind of oath?”
“An oath?”
“It’s never happened before,” says Ezbeth.
“It happened last night and it will happen again. It’s a matter of time.”
“Wait, what are you suggesting?” she asks.
“Nothing,” Keslin says earnestly. “Just that it worries me.”
They click judiciously down the central corridor, past the mural of Temple history, each thinking unspoken thoughts. Ezbeth breaks off and makes for the service stairs and Arana catches her elbow.
“What are you going to tell them?” he asks.
“What would you like me to tell them?”
“I don’t care… just don’t say they’ve run away.”
“The girls from Lia’s room already know. At least they know she’s gone.”
“Tell them that we’re holding them.”
“Why?”
“Suspicion.”
“Very well,” she says, and plods heavily up the steps, leaving Keslin and the troubled young King alone in the rear wings of the amphitheatre.
“Any word from our spies?” asks Keslin.
“None,” says Arana. “They seem content to die.”
“Then we will not let them.”
Jack wakes up with a splitting headache in the late afternoon. He nudges Lia and they push their branch-laced shelter aside and collect themselves. He listens attentively to the forest, glancing across the tree line for any motion.
“I think it’s clear.”
Lia sits rubbing her temples. “Can we kill something? I’m starving.”
Jack gives her a sheepish grin. “Sorry, we have to keep moving.”
She looks at him for a spell, working him with her large brown eyes, then she takes her knife and a rock and moves from tree to tree looking for grub holes. Jack sneaks back to the stream to fetch more water and by the time he returns she has several fat white worms wriggling on her palm.
“Breakfast,” she says, and gives him a couple.
“Thanks. I’ll shoot the next thing we come across.”
They set out, hoping to make as much distance as they can before nightfall. The sun hangs low in the west and they keep it to their right as they set off. They plod through the peaks and troughs of the interior woodland, chipmunks and rabbits lighting off into the brush as they approach. Wherever they settle for the night, Jack figures he can sit still for a while and try to skewer one.
They walk in comfortable silence for a while. Lia’s being has been split asunder for years, and without the presence of her captors she still catches her thoughts trying to follow the same poisoned patterns, so ingrained they’ve become. As they march, her fractured mind slowly reassembles itself, melding from two Lias back into one, and each moment with Jack threads a new suture point.
“Do you think there’s anything left? Of our home?”
“No,” says Jack. He knows what she is thinking because he thought it himself. Part of him wants to make a straight shot back there now, if they could even find their way, just to see it, to be there again. “I don’t think we should go. I think it would only make us sad.”
Lia nods and lets out a shaky breath.
They carry on, each lost in their own contemplations. A few breaks in the canopy provide a clear shot to the coast and Jack looks apprehensively around for any searchers.
“Why… why did you join them?”
Her question catches him off guard. “I don’t really know if I had a choice. I tried not to think about it.”
“It’s okay.”
“I don’t know if it is.”
“Did you ever… did you have to…?”
“No. I never burned people.”
Lia exhales deep relief.
“What about you?” he asks. “What was it like?”
She grimaces. “I wish I could say I hated every moment. Working in the kitchen wasn’t bad—sometimes it was nice. That’s why it was horrible.” Jack gives her a curious look. “After a while, I didn’t mind when they were mean. It was easier to hate them then. The worst times were when they were… normal.”
Jack nods. He thinks back to the empathy Arana showed him in the pit and he shudders.
“I wish we could’ve left with everybody.”
“We never would’ve made it.”
“Do you think they’re okay?”
Jack snaps off a thin twig from a manzanita and plucks the little leaves off and flings them away. “I don’t know,” he says softly.
He knows one who is not okay—Braylon—dead by his own hand. He thinks of Lathan and Jeneth and Phoebe and rest they left behind, and he takes Lia’s hand and they pace along solemnly.
They tread along a scenic crest, where the lichen-covered manors that once enjoyed stunning vistas of the ocean now rot with quiet dignity.
“Can I see the map?” Lia asks, mostly to break the silence. Jack hands her the pack off his shoulder and she digs it out, unrolling it carefully and squinting to read by the evening light. “These look like little mountains,” she says, running her fingers over the inked diagram. “And rivers.” She holds it out flat and orientates the line of the coast along the right, so it matches the natural layout, then focuses on the little star drawn in at the bottom. “How far do you think it is?”
“Farther than we’ve ever gone, I know that.”
She turns the map over in her hands and reads the scribbled note.
Renning and Ethan dead
Nezra knows of Alexandria
“Al… exan… dria,” she sounds out slowly, learning the exotic new word. “What is… Alexandria?”
“A place with answers, the man said.”
“What does that mean? Answers to what?”
“I’m not quite sure…” he says, “but I think I have an idea. Remember those paintings in the Temple? The ones that told how it started?”
“I’ll never forget.”
“There was a man, they called him prophet…”
“Thomas.”
“Yes. It could be chance, but the way they showed that man… the way he looked and everything… it reminded me of this Ethan who saved us.”
“Oh yes… I remember.”
“So this prophet taught the first Arana how to do all the things he did. He told how to build the Temple and everything.”
“So where did he come from?”
“Don’t know. They spent a lot of time looking… but they never found it. Some say it’s legend, that it doesn’t even exist. But now… I think he came from here.” Jack points to the star. “And if one man can teach how to build a temple like ours, then think what a whole city could do. They must have temples that are so huge you can’t even imagine.”
“Not another temple,” Lia says wearily.
“I thought that, too, but… Ethan wasn’t friendly with them back there—they wanted him killed. He said we have to warn somebody about the Nezra, so I thought… whoever they are, maybe they’ll be on our side. If we can reach them.”
“Maybe,” she says, tucking the map away and slinging the pack over her shoulder. “Or maybe this prophet is the one who taught them how to burn people.”
“We don’t have to go…”
“No—I want to go. I want to find out. I’m just scared.”
Their shadows stretch out skinny and long and the timbre of the forest makes its evening transition, eerie hoots and rustlings from the peregrinations of unseen night feeders echo around them. They hike more briskly, looking for a hiding place to settle in before the light is gone. Jack draws his bow and holds an arrow between his fingers, searching for prey and predator alike. Around a bend they see a small, shaded clearing and tread cautiously toward it.
“Wait,” says Jack.
What looked like shadows from a distance now comes starkly into view. The ground is blackened, surrounded by a ring of scorched trees and bushes. A strip of black earth cuts east from the epicenter, where the flames ran their wind-driven course.
“Wildfire?”
“No… look…”
Jack points to the straight lengths of burned wood, some still fastened together at right angles. Piles and piles of them come into focus as they move quietly into the blighted area. A wasteland in microcosm lay spread out before them. The settlement couldn’t have been much to begin with, and it has been utterly ravaged. The ash is rain-packed and old. Stray weeds poke through the charred layer, thin green shreds of life gasping for air and sunlight. As she looks around, Lia feels profoundly grateful they did not sojourn back to their own destroyed home.
“Oh… oh, it’s horrible.”
Slithering vines entangle carbonized skulls and ribcages, half sunk into the earth and overlaid with moss and scattered leaves. Jack and Lia take fragile steps through the hallowed ground, stilled by the dreadful energy surrounding them, drifting along like delegates of the living haunting a field of ghosts. The susurrations of wind sound like the playful laughter of distant children, ebbing and fluxing through the cool, darkening twilight.
They stop and pay their respects, breathing in the acrid musk of razed land. Neither of them gives voice to the notion, but they both know very well what happened here, and who is responsible—a menacing reminder of their own pursuers.
“Come on.”
Deeper into the woods they roam, searching for a place to lay their heads. They wander down a narrow escarpment, bound in by thick groves of trees, and by the last wisps of daylight they set a small camp.
“If you fetch some sticks and tinder, I’ll see if I can shoot something. Stay close.”
Lia hops around, plucking up dry branches and handfuls of dead weeds. Jack slinks a little farther south and picks a spot to nest. He sits patiently, steadying himself, and before long it pays off. A chubby opossum malingers across the forest floor, holding fast to the brush line, snuffling about for insects and carrion. As Jack draws the bowstring the opossum flashes its beady little eyes and starts to wobble away. The arrow lodges into its hindquarters and Jack snatches it up and kills it.
He crosses over a rocky knoll and dresses the carcass, cleaning off the arrow and stowing it, then carries the meat back to their camp. Lia sits around the little ring of stones she assembled, with sticks bunched together in the center like a little teepee. Jack sparks it with his flint and starts to skewer the meat for cooking. He’s been restless since they passed the burned village and he takes constant glances over his shoulder, worried that some soot-blackened warrior could drop from the trees at any moment.
“We’d better put the fire out after we cook this.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.” She sits down next to him and holds her skewer over the flames. “It smells really good.”
“Thanks. Better than worms.”
“I don’t know, I’m getting a taste for them.”
“I can dig some out for you, if you want.”
“That’s okay.”
They sit by the warm fire, eating the greasy dark meat and licking their fingers clean. When they’re finished Jack tamps out the fire and they move to a little sleeping spot they’ve picked out. Lying close together for warmth, they listen to the sounds of the forest and stare up at the night sky.
“Do you think there’s people out there?” Lia asks, fixing on a distant star.
“People like us?”
“Same or different, either way.”
“It’d be strange if there weren’t. It all looks too big for just us.”
“Way too big,” she says. “How far do you think it goes?”
Jack ponders. “Not sure. But they used to know. My mom said they used to know all about what’s out there in the stars. She said people used to fly out to the stars pretty much all the time.”
“I wish I could fly out there right now.”
“So do I.”
The crisp points glitter on like a scattering of quartz crystals, cool and cryptic, and the celestial talismans of yore glide by silently above, from one horizon to the other, sailing along on their Ageless journey.
The prisoners are dragged through the central corridor, deep within the heart of the Nezran Temple, images of horrible conflagration flashing by them as they go. The blaze encompasses them and the hideous screaming demonbeasts that rise from the flames have the two mysterious travelers believing they are being led to some macabre execution chamber and these are the gates through which they must pass.
The warriors drag them past the scenes of wreckage and stop finally in front of a happier depiction of a much simpler village than now stands—rustic wood beam cabins and a flock of villagers encircling two men. Ethan’s eyes narrow on one of them. His skin is chalky and he trembles with blood loss and burgeoning infection. There is a crude splint strapped to his leg, soaked with blood, and it takes two men to hold him up.
“You know this man,” Arana says, pointing to the prophet. Ethan shakes his head. “Did he send you?”
“No one sent us. We’re roaming.”
“Roaming?”
“Yes,” says Renning, expressionless in his restraints.
“Why did you draw our Temple?”
“Because… it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Arana launches toward him and seizes him by the shoulders. Renning flinches, expecting a blow to come. Arana focuses raptly on his eyes, looking intensely through them, a growing vacantness on his face. Renning looks back, mystified. Arana stares into him for a great, long moment that stretches into awkward silence. The warriors shift and glance around. He releases Renning and clasps his hands onto Ethan’s feeble shoulders and practices the bizarre mesmerism again, boring deeply into his wide pupils.
Keslin lingers around the foyer, glancing askance at Arana’s activities, then hitches toward the corridor.
“I think I know where you’re from,” Arana whispers into Ethan’s ear. “You know this man, I can see it in your face. Did he tell you about us?”
“I don’t know him. Please, please just let us go and we’ll be on our way and never bother you again.”
“Only if you tell me what you know.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“You know what we call ourselves.”
“No.”
“You do, it was written on your drawing. How do you know our name?”
“We…”
“Yes?”
“Break his ribs,” says Keslin.
The men look to Arana and he nods tensely. Two warriors brace Renning against the wall while a third feels along his abdomen for the sharp floating ribs, then cracks a pickhammer solidly against his side and snaps one off. Renning hinges over and jerks with pain and the warriors adjust their footing to hold him in place.
“It only gets worse from here,” Keslin tells him. “Talk to me now and I’ll put you down quickly.”
“I have… nothing to tell,” Renning wheezes. He fixes on Arana and grins through bloodstained teeth. “You will never find it. Never.”