Crecheling (19 page)

“Sure.” Dyan didn’t know herself, of course, but she had read books and enjoyed lectures on history and folklore. “And they had weapons, things that could kill at a distance, even a great distance. They had weapons that caused explosions, and weapons that could melt buildings, and weapons that could kill a person at a great distance by penetrating him with a bit of metal.”

“Pistols,” Jak said. “Guns.”

Dyan was startled.
Pistol
was one of the words in the Gallows Song, and she hadn’t recognized it. She thought she’d heard it at Ratsnay Station, too. “What are pistols and guns?” she asked.

“There are ruins out by Ratsnay Station,” he told her. “Pre-Cataclysmic. Everyone knows they’re haunted. They call it Farkill, because the ghosts there can kill you at a distance. Everyone knows to stay away.”

“I don’t understand.”

“
Pistols
and
Guns
are the names of specters that kill people in the ruins.
It isn’t safe to play with Guns
, that’s what mothers in Ratsnay Station have been telling their children since … since forever. There are stories about how Guns bites children with his long metal tooth when they try to play with him, even from far away. Pistols is something similar.
It isn’t safe to leave Pistols lying around
, they say. You have to bury Pistols, the stories go, put him in a
safe place
, or he may bite you with his steel tooth.”

“Yeah,” said Eirig, “but that’s
ghosts
.”

“Is it?”

“Could it be?” Dyan asked. “Could Ratsnay Station be sitting on pre-Cataclysmic weapons and not know it?”

Ahead, a long wharf and a trading camp fast approached.

***

Chapter Twenty

“I don’t know why you care about Pistols and Guns,” Jak said, as they rode south out of the Shoshan trading camp.

Jak had haggled with the Shoshan barterers, a trio of solemn-faced old men with canny looks in their eyes and hair braided in long queues down their backs, for a saddle to replace the one they had lost at Narl’s and Aleena’s cabin. The Shoshan had never spoken a word that Dyan could understand, and had conducted the entire negotiation using gestures. Two colored blankets, one blue and one yellow, lay side by side across a heavy wooden table, and Jak and the Shoshan had made offers and counteroffers by placing objects on the blankets, the yellow holding the items Jak would surrender and the blue holding what the Shoshan were willing to give in exchange. The traders had shown no interest when Jak had offered one of the monofilament bolas, but had let shine through a glimpse of excitement when Outrider Lorne’s goggles had been offered. Eventually, Jak had come away with a saddle, several waterskins full of water, strips of dried meat pounded with berries, and the blue blanket itself.

“I’m not sure I do,” Dyan countered thoughtfully.

They left the Shoshan and the Nemapi merchants haggling in silence over finished goods and rode south through crunchy yellow grass. Dyan rode behind Jak on Outrider Lorne’s horse, and Eirig rode alone on the Nemapi beast, which, when the two stood shoulder to shoulder, looked like a pony. Ahead of them, the hills bulked up, the broad valleys narrowed into canyons, and the Wahai proper began. The sun pounded down without mercy, and Dyan was sweating.

“You’re not really a killer,” Jak said.

“Neither are you.”

“Ah, but
I
am,” Eirig interjected. “Bloodthirsty as old Guns himself, they all say it.”

“I do what I have to do,” Jak defended himself. “And anyway, you’re plenty capable of slicing up man and beast with those monofilament weapons of yours without going chasing after ghost stories. Which is probably all it is.”

“Pulling his pistol, he shot her,” Dyan sang. “That doesn’t sound like a ghost.”

“It doesn’t sound like a pre-Cataclysmic weapon capable of making things explode, either.
He shot her
, that’s all the song says. Did he
melt
her? Cause her entire settlement to
burn to the ground
? It almost sounds polite, the way the song has it. Maybe he administered medicine.”

“But then they hang him.”

“Well … okay,” Jak conceded. “But you can’t give too much weight to old songs, especially when you don’t understand them.”

“I don’t really care about Pistols,” Dyan said. “But what if this ruin had other things? Information, for instance, about life before the Cataclysm? Or about the Cataclysm and what caused it?”

“I don’t care about the people who lived before the Cataclysm. I care about people who are alive,” Jak said. “Death is where I draw the line. You die, I stop caring about you.”

Dyan bit back words about Aleena, or about his father or Eirig’s, or about his friends who had been Culled. She stifled her own feelings, too, about Wayland and Aleena. She tried not to remember how it had felt to watch Outrider Lorne crumple to the ground dead, a complete stranger she had had to kill in order to survive, at whose death she had felt relief.

“What about maps?” Dyan asked. “What if the ruins of Farkill had a map that showed us the way to Satulak, or Sayatil, or Portolan?”

“More ruins,” Jak dismissed the suggestion.

“We don’t know that,” Dyan said. “No one knows that because, as far as I can tell, no one’s been to those places since the Cataclysm. At least, I’ve never heard of it, and no one will admit to knowing. And even if they are ruins, what if they’re still places where we can just be together, and not be followed by the System? Wouldn’t that be worth it?”

“Is there another girl in this picture?” Eirig asked. “Or do I get to play the heroic character of the fellow consoling himself with his one remaining hand for the rest of my life?”

“What are you talking about?” Jak turned beet red.

“Ah, don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m an idiot,” Eirig said. “Lucky for all of us, I’m not the jealous type.”

“Anyway,” Jak continued, trying to get off this subject, “I told you I’ve been into the ruins, and I didn’t see any maps.”

“Yeah?” Dyan asked. “How much of it did you explore? What were you looking for, and how did you look?”

“I wasn’t exploring,” Jak said. “I was proving I wasn’t a coward. I did what you have to do—I stayed the night with Guns and Pistols.”

“And did they bite you?” Dyan mocked him slightly.

“No,” he admitted. “But the wind was pretty fierce. Farkill is out in the flat middle of nowhere, and a lot of the walls are punched through, so bad weather just comes right on in.”

“And did you do this, too?” she asked Eirig.

He nodded. “I’m no coward.”

“So in other words,” Dyan summarized what she was hearing, “you hunkered down behind a wall and slept all night.”

“That doesn’t make me sound as heroic as I felt at the time,” Eirig said. “But it isn’t wrong.”

“I didn’t see any maps,” Jak admitted, “but maybe they’re there. It’s a big place, and Pistols and Guns could be keeping all kinds of secrets. Do you want to go look?” He pointed straight ahead down the canyon with his whole arm. “We could just ride south, straight through the Wahai and turn left. We could be back at Ratsnay Station in a couple of weeks. We’d have made a nice big circle.”

“Maybe I do,” Dyan said. “But right now I want to find a place to stop early and make camp. I’m exhausted.”

They followed a deer trail and found a box canyon, high above the floor of the main canyon at the top of a long sandy slope. They ate dried meat and drank water without a fire, and as the sun began to go down, Eirig loudly volunteered to stand the first watch. He took a field lens with him and disappeared.

Jak said nothing, but sat and held Dyan’s hand while they watched the stars come out together. Later, when he had fallen asleep, she covered them both with a microfiber blanket and lay awake, wondering what to do until Eirig stumbled back into camp, singing in a very loud voice.

In the morning, she taught Jak how to shoot with a bow. Once he had mastered basic posture and fingering and how to aim, she had him sink arrows into the trunks of a couple of old trees until nearly midday.

“This is fun,” Eirig commented as he chewed on his noon strip of meat and watched. “But it doesn’t seem as useful as the bola.”

“It’s much more useful,” Dyan disagreed. “You can hunt with the bow.”

“Oh, I’ve seen what one of those things can do to a horse,” Eirig said, pointing to the bolas that rode now on Dyan’s hips. “I expect it would do more or less the same thing to a deer, and the meat would be entirely edible. Besides,
I
can’t hunt with a bow.”

“You’ll never make your own bola in a pinch, though,” Jak pointed out. “Not that slices people in half, anyway. And if you mess up with the bow, you won’t take off your own limbs.”

“Aw,” Eirig grumbled. “Where’s the fun in it, then?”

“I’ll teach you to use the bola, too,” Dyan promised. “We have three of them, it would be good to share. Besides,” she looked at each of them playfully, “you’ll need something to defend yourselves against the mighty Pistols and Guns.”

Jak looked at Dyan with long and serious eyes, until she felt herself blushing and looked down. “Okay,” he agreed. “Back to Ratsnay Station it is.” With that agreement, it felt like their journey again acquired direction.

They rode several miles that evening, following the canyons south. Game was plentiful but water wasn’t always easy to come by, so they filled all their flasks and skins at every opportunity. As the sun set and the narrow canyon’s shadows became the darkness of night, Dyan rode around a bend in the path and saw they were not alone.

There were five of them, and they looked rough. Even if there had only been one or two, she would have been wary, but she definitely didn’t want to get into a fight with the odds against her. She had the reins of the horse, with Jak mounted behind her, but she let one hand drift down and rest on the bola at her hip.

They wore wool serapes, but not the colorful, bright weave of the Basku. Their outer garments were long and brown, the dirt and dust pounded into the wool only serving to make them even closer to the color of the canyon’s rock walls. They were all men, and unkempt. Ragged beards of various lengths fouled their jawlines, and hair that shimmered with grease spread across the backs of their necks. Two of them rode with spears in their stirrups, pointed at the sky. They all had swords or axes. Two lean dogs with patchy dark fur slunk along in the middle of the band.

It might have been her imagination, but Dyan imagined she could smell them as soon as she saw them, a hundred feet away. They stared back at her with expressions that suggested that they, in turn, found her repellent.

“This sort of makes me feel like we should have started with the bolas rather than the bow,” Eirig muttered.

Then Dyan realized that she was still dressed as an Outrider. She even still had Lorne’s badge pinned to her chest.

There was no time to back down now. She held her head high and took the bola from its holster, just in case. She held it in her left hand, discreetly invisible from the men as she urged her horse to pass them on the left, their rights. This would make it harder for them to draw weapons and attack her, she thought. Especially the spears.

The man in front spat on the ground, but didn’t draw a weapon. The others growled, frowned, or stared with beady eyes, but Dyan kept her head high and stared them down. The power that forced the men back was in her uniform, she realized, and not her own gaze. Still, she had to put on a good face, or even the uniform of the feared Outriders wouldn’t be enough. She wished she could Jak’s face, but he was fierce and she was sure he was giving stares as tough and menacing as he got. The two dogs snarled back at her, but they also held their attack.

She heard low grumbling as she passed the last of them, and then behind her she heard Eirig yelp, “Hey!”

She turned around. The last of the men had leaned over in the saddle and grabbed Eirig’s saddlebag. With his stump, Eirig struggled to stop the man from stealing their supplies, but without fingers there wasn’t much he could do.

Then the man drew a knife.

The dogs barked.

His knife was a long weapon, hooked forward and jagged-looking, with great scallops like bite marks in the blade side. He raised it—

“Hey!” Dyan yelled.

She raised the bola over her head and the bandit looked back at her. He grimaced and exhaled through his nostrils.

Behind him, his four comrades stopped and turned around.

“There’s five of us, Outrider,” the bandit growled. “You gonna kill us all?”

The dogs growled, too, and one of them barked again.

Dyan knew that a shot through all five men with her bola was possible. She also knew it was very hard, and that as soon as fighting broke out, she would be the target of every one of the dangerous-looking ruffians.

“Only if I have to.”

She and the bandit stared at each other, and she curled up her lip to show her disdain.

One of the men in the back of the line shouted something she didn’t understand. The bandit in front narrowed his eyes in hatred and practically threw Eirig back into his own saddle. Eirig slipped, but caught himself with his one hand. He glared at the bandit and said nothing.

Without a word, the outlaws turned their horses around and kept riding.

“Holy Mother,” Eirig breathed.

Dyan turned to Jak to calm herself and saw that, without her noticing it, he had armed himself with one of the bows.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get some miles behind us and find a place to sleep.”

Dyan’s heart was still racing fast an hour later when they chose their site. She set a false camp like she’d done outside of Marsick, lighting a small fire on a shoulder of hill over a bend in the canyon. The fire threw up a feeble orange light against the wall beside it, but in the darkness of the canyon that light looked immense.

They led their horses into the real campsite. It was a crack in the canyon wall that never quite turned into a real canyon itself, but after thirty feet of cutting back into the stone, ascended sharply over boulders, desiccated tree trunk fragments, and other rubble. They let the horses crop what grass they could in the canyon for half an hour after they rubbed them down, and then led them deep into the crack to hide.

Dyan stood watch. She kept the field lens pressed to her eye, scanning the star-shimmering darkness for signs of movement and trying to keep her ears tuned to the chirruping rhythms of the night.

Jak and Eirig lay down. Jak kept a bow and arrows beside him, though in the darkness Dyan thought he was likely to shoot friend as foe. Soon both boys were breathing regularly, and Dyan continued her watch alone.

Probably, she told herself, the bandits wouldn’t come back. If they had really wanted to attack, they would have done it on the trail. She played back the incident in her mind and wondered whether it would have been better if she hadn’t been dressed as an Outrider. Had she provoked them? Or would they have been even more prompt to seek a confrontation if she hadn’t been wearing Outrider Lorne’s badge?

She had always had a romantic idea of the Wahai, she now saw. Its reality was dirty men who robbed you because they could, and because they wanted to. Was life in the System or in the settlements worse than that, even with the Cull? And would life in Satulak or Sayatil possibly be any better?

Click
.

Dyan’s heart stopped. She probed the shadows around the false fire, looking for motion or silhouettes that didn’t belong. The sound could have been a falling rock, knocked over by the breeze or by time or by a passing animal. It could have been the hoof of a deer, striking the dry creek bed. There was every reason to be cautious, but no reason to be panicked.

Click
.

There it was again. Dyan wasn’t sure she trusted herself to throw the bola in the darkness. She drew her whip instead, planning to keep the filament extended as little as possible, and use the weapon more like a sword than like a whip.