Ashes of the Earth (11 page)

Some
hay trickled down from the loft overhead, and Hadrian looked up to
see three pairs of eyes looking out of the shadows. One of the
children leaned forward. It was Dora, Buchanan's younger daughter.
"What's Christmas?" she asked.

Hadrian
sighed. "We call it the Year-End Festival now."

He
pulled a photo of a locomotive from the wall and pointed to the rails
underneath. "What did you think those rails were for? There is
no one waiting on the other side to take you for a ride on one of
these. I used to travel on those trains when I was your age. They're
not on the other side, Dax, they're in the past. Gone."

"That's
what you say, to keep us from taking the ride."A chill ran down
Hadrian's spine. "We've heard them tell us in their own words,"
Dax declared stubbornly.

"Tell
you what?"

"About
the dead land. The ghosts go into the dead land and come back. Then
they tell us about it. They eat hamburgers and have bicycles that
ride without pedaling."

"Toy
trucks and baby dolls!" Dora exclaimed from above.

Hadrian
lowered himself onto a bench by the wall. His voice cracked as he
spoke. "People don't die and come back."

Dax
grew very solemn. He suddenly seemed years older. "The first
time I seen it I was so scared I ran into the forest. He was dead,
dead for hours. Then he sat up and opened his eyes. Bloody hell,
those eyes."

"His
eyes?"

"The
pupils were pale blue, like the sky all washed out after a storm.
Almost like he had no eyes at all, 'cause he left the real ones on
the other side to keep watch. We all ran, because we knew old books
about monsters coming from the other side. Zombies, they call them.

But
he just laughed when we ran. Later he found us and told us about the
beautiful things he had seen, said the ones up on Suicide Ridge had
been right, that he seen them playing on the other side."

Hadrian
shuddered, as much from Dax's earnest tone as his words. The boy
truly believed in what he was saying.

"We
weren't sure either until he began bringing things back for us."

Hadrian
stared at him, filled with new foreboding. "What things?"

Overhead,
Dora disappeared, then came down a ladder stair clutching something
wrapped in old sacking. When she reached Hadrian she uncovered the
object. It was a large, exquisitely worked blond doll in a white
dress that could have been fresh from a store shelf thirty years
before. When Dora reached the wall she pointed. Following her small
finger, Hadrian saw that it was not simply another photo, but a color
plate torn from a Bible. It portrayed a blond angel with rays of
brilliant light emanating behind it. The girl held the doll up to a
crack in the boards, causing it, too, to be illuminated from the back
by shafts of sunlight.

From
behind Dora a boy approached, extending a shiny new toy truck exactly
like one in another ad. As Hadrian stared in disbelief, Dax
disappeared into the shadows at the back of the mill and returned
carrying an object wrapped in deerskin. It was a brilliantly painted
six-inch-high figure of a bearded wizard with a small dragon resting
on his shoulder.

"It's
salvage," Hadrian said, well aware of the pleading in his voice.

"No
one's ever brought anything like these back from salvage," Dax
countered. "Salvage is old. Salvage is rusty and dirty."

Hadrian
sighed heavily. "How many of these ghosts are there?"

"Three
that I've seen," Dax reported.

"People
you knew before?"

"People
from away I think. They had the smell."

Hadrian
tensed. "Exiles?"

"From
away."

Away.
It could mean the
outlying farmers, or exiles, or the hunters who stayed distant except
to bring in hides. Perhaps even those impoverished survivors who eked
out their sustenance on the far side of the sea. Hadrian then
remembered the odor of those who had assaulted him in the clearing.
Emily too had spoken of visitors who smelled of spice. "Please,"
Hadrian said. "Please don't try for more, don't take a ride
looking for such things."

Dax
began rewrapping his wizard. "The jackals ain't going away. The
jackals have big work to do."

"And
what's the price, Dax? What are they forcing you to do to become a
full member?"

The
boy just smirked.

Hadrian
wearily rose, searching for something on the young faces, on the
magazine pages, that might explain the mystery these children
guarded. He should have been angry, yet all he could feel was a deep
sorrow. His eyes settled on a solitary advertisement on the back of a
door,
reach
out and touch someone, it said. With a shaking hand he pulled the ad
from the wall,
don't
forget those you left behind, read another that touted a cellular
phone.

"It
was you at his grave!"
Why
would you bury an old phone with Jonah?
he
was about to blurt out. Then he saw the pain in the boy's eyes. "How
did you know Jonah?" he asked instead.

"He
would visit our fields sometimes," Dax explained, gesturing
toward the fallow patch of ground outside. "Looking for insects,
birds, even flowers. We would help him. He brought books to us,
sometimes he read to us. About a great white fish. About Indians.
Last month he brought that book about pirates and we sat around a
fire as he read. 'Fifteen Men on a Dead Man's Chest.'" For the
first time
Hadrian
noticed a shelf of books by the aisle that led to the rear of the
mill. He saw
Treasure
Island. Kidnapped. Ivanhoe. Robinson Crusoe. Huckleberry Finn. Swiss
Family Robinson.

Hadrian
felt a flush of shame. If he had not been drunk or in jail so often
over the past few months, he would have known, probably would have
joined Jonah on such trips. "What would you want him to talk
about if he called?"

Dax
shrugged. "Say I'm sorry about the saw pit."

"Saw
pit?"

"He
was going to meet us there in two days. To read the end of the pirate
book. And explain the pictures."

"What
else, Dax? You didn't bury a phone to apologize about missing a
reading. What else would you ask about?"

The
boy shifted uncomfortably. "About who's got the words now. About
the running."

Hadrian
gazed at him, struggling to understand. "Are you saying you were
doing work for Jonah?"

Dax
gazed at him in silence for a long moment then spun about to the crew
of his strange little ship. "Man the boats!" he called out.

Like
mice in the night Dax and the children disappeared into the shadows.

A
thin, black-haired
doctor was bent over
Jamie Reese writing on a medical chart as Hadrian arrived at the
second-floor room. The comatose man still lay on the bed where
Hadrian had last seen him.

"Any
change?"

The
doctor started, caught off guard, then straightened. "None for
the better," he muttered, then passed Emily as he slipped out of
the room.

"You
can't just walk in like some kind of intruder, ignoring the woman at
the front desk," Emily groused. She was out of breath from
running up the stairs. "She wanted to send for the police."

"I
thought the police were protecting him."

"The
governor declined your request."

Hadrian
lifted Reese's hands, the scarred, callused hands of a fisherman.
"What else have you learned about him?" he asked.

"He
shouts out sometimes, like he's having nightmares."

"Shouts
what?"

"More
like cries of terror. Nothing coherent. Once he sat up shaking with
fear and said a flock of snakes with wings was chasing him."

He
reached over to open the man's eyelids.

"Hadrian,
no, let him be. He—" Emily's protest choked off with a
gasp.

The
patient's irises were pale blue, almost so light in color as to be
invisible against the whites of the eyes. Hadrian was looking at a
ghost.

As
Hadrian stared in disbelief he became aware of movement behind him,
followed by another cry of alarm. Sergeant Waller stood at his
shoulder.

"Does
it mean he is dead?" she asked in a frightened whisper.

"No,
Jori," Emily replied. "He still has a strong pulse."

Hadrian
stepped between Reese and the police officer. "I told you I
would find you in a couple of days."

The
sergeant seemed to struggle to turn her gaze from the figure on the
bed to Hadrian. "I didn't know you were here."

Emily
put a hand on his arm. "Jori's from a good family, Hadrian,"
she said, as if apologizing on her behalf.

Hadrian
looked in confusion from one woman to the other. "Where the
sergeant comes from," he said slowly, "is the governor and
Kenton.

She's
been assigned to report on me. She is a brilliant actress. Wanted me
to believe she was just a middling clerk."

Before
Waller could reply, Emily pulled on Hadrian's arm as if to distract
him. "What do you expect? Buchanan would never give you a free
hand without keeping watch."

Hadrian
stared at the doctor, struggling to understand why she seemed to be
defending the sergeant. "Perhaps you forget I used to award
badges at our police graduations," he said, an edge of
bitterness in his voice. "That's when they take a vow to
maintain justice and protect the people."

His
words seemed to disturb Waller. She slowly looked up. "My father
was a policeman in the ...
he
was a policeman before," she said in a tight voice. "All he
had were daughters. I was the oldest."

Emily
seemed unaware that her hand was still on Hadrian's arm, or how
tightly it was squeezing him. "You need to go, Jori," she
said. There was an odd entreaty in the doctor's voice.

Hadrian
looked down at Reese. "You mean you came to see him?"

Sergeant
Waller pursed her lips together and nodded. "When I used to
investigate on my own, my cases never came together. Then the
governor began to take a personal interest in my work, as if he were
training me for something. My last big case was in the fishery. There
was reason to suspect smuggling by the head of the fishery guild,
Captain Fletcher. Fletcher the One Eye, the working man's
representative on the Council. The governor gave me papers that said
I was a health inspector. Then Fletcher offered me a bribe to leave
him alone. I said no. I think that's what caused him to suspect me.
He tried to scare me away. I finally found a crew member willing to
talk about trips in the north, about fish being offloaded illegally
outside Carthage and other cargoes being loaded. About strangers from
outside Carthage meeting on fishing boats."

Hadrian
considered her words a moment, wondering whether she was acting now.
He regarded the figure in the bed. "You mean the hero from the
sinking of the
Anna
was your source,"
he said.

"I
think the governor had a plan to arrest one of the biggest criminals
in Carthage, then put his own man in charge of the fishery. But then
Jamie disappeared. Never showed up at a scheduled meet, never came
back aboard his ship when it docked."

"Not,"
Hadrian suggested, "until he had had his accident."

"The
governor was furious. He called me incompetent. He said I didn't have
a clue about how life worked in Carthage."

Hadrian
weighed her words. "You mean you were supposed to accept the
bribe," he said after a moment. "It's the world Buchanan
lives in. He was certain Fletcher would offer a bribe, certain you
would accept it. Then he would confront Fletcher."

"But
Fletcher was on the Council by then," Emily inserted. "Buchanan
wouldn't want the scandal."

"There
would be no scandal. Buchanan wouldn't want to arrest Fletcher, he
would want to control him. The sergeant and Fletcher would become new
pawns because Buchanan could throw them in prison at any time.
Except," he added, "the sergeant upset his plans with her
unexpected honesty."