The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] (20 page)

So Loo returned patiently to the earlier method. The logs stacked up. The ropes grew distressingly taut. Where were the other fliers? She tried crying out a warning, but it was useless against the water thunder.

When the net trembled once again, Loo expected the accompanying log blast, but there was none. She turned, afraid and puzzled: Had a support given way? If one guy line snapped, she guessed, the others would quickly follow. But the lines were in place, vibrating angrily, and the tower of white mist methodically pounded the mountain of tree trunks in the center of the net. She heaved one log over the net’s rim as another crashed into place. Panting, Loo rope hopped wearily down the slope.

When she arrived at the log pile, the fierce, bulletlike shower quickly erased the blood from her forearms. The coating of blood would return again in the coming minutes, as it had with sickening regularity.

Loo stepped up the pile until she found a log that could be pulled away freely. She stepped deeper into the stinging shower to put an arm around one end and roll the log down, the pine bark biting into her wrist. A dark shadow flickered back in the blinding white mist. She put her other arm to her brow to ward off the gale, squinted, and suddenly found herself scissored between the legs of a falling giant.

They landed hard on the side of the log pile, Nora Londi on top of Loo. The bird woman heard her wings crunch under her back and a sickly moist pain stabbed at her right side.

Panicking, Loo clawed at the shattered wing wood under her. The knife. A knee rammed her jaw, and Loo’s vision dimmed. The large woman was a crushing weight, and Loo’s lungs could not expand enough to meet demand.

Nora Londi’s hair streamed down in a wild mass of red seaweed. Her hands were still bound behind her, and she leaned down awkwardly to tear a chunk of wing from under her slender captive—the shard that held the flier’s knife, a knife that would make quick work of the netting. Then the giant seemed becalmed. A slight smile pressed her cheeks back. The two women traded stares, and Londi leaned down as if to share a cosmic secret with her trembling companion. Londi’s head bobbed rhythmically, her stair-stepped nose touching Loo’s ear. Over the howl of thrashing water she shouted one word, “Now!” and rolled away into the white cloud. Loo lifted her head into the torrent, aching, puzzled, and then the log landed.

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Over the distant net, Tha’Enton saw a curious mushroom cloud of red mist rise around the waterfall and settle quietly into the lake. It was an omen, he knew, harkening back to ancient times.

The Monitor was dancing maliciously nearer, but the Sounder stuck to his duty, fingers picking through the field of Pa bones. Even when the reddening monster arrived, lungs gurgling, breath like soured garlic, Tha’Enton did not break stride. He could not.

And then a riotous metallic boom echoed up the canyon and back again. The Monitor turned to look; the musician played. There was no more net under the waterfall, no more pile of logs. No more turbine. Just two thick shafts angling down from the rock into the lake.

The Monitor stamped in the sand with both feet and a squeal rattled to the top of his throat. He turned back to Tha’Enton, slinging saliva onto the Pa.

Tha’Enton studied the sticky bones, deciding how he would proceed with the music. The Monitor swept a hand down on the Pa, and it collapsed in a clatter like a child’s toy log building.

The Song of Cataclysm was over. The offended Sounder trembled, rage and horror raking his body. But the Pa was not repairable, and the music had become instantly irrelevant. His faculties regrouped toward the second of his Rafer duties—finally, he reasoned, with the music done he could become Defender.

Tha’Enton pictured his next move: His right foot would step back, he would crouch slightly, drop both arms down to the thigh straps, and whirl forward with both knives drawn.

The Monitor thought quicker. Before the musician could move, the bull-beast had kicked his heel into his gut, and Tha’Enton collapsed on the beach, his airless lungs writhing. Mere breathing brought a scraping of broken ribs. A gratuitous kick to the jaw jolted his brain into a starry blackness.

“Ah, stripping down one more Rafer. You don’t need these.” Tha’Enton heard the words through his shrieking pain. He felt his knives being unstrapped by deft fingers and his quiver peeled away. The beast is so huge, a frightened inner voice cried, and he fought to turn that notion away. The warrior in him knew that girth was just one factor and pain did not matter. Pain was just a message from body to brain, a message of distress. Pain did … not … matter.

When his vision cleared, the Monitor was shaking the arrows and thrower disks out of his quiver. The Monitor tossed the quiver at Tha’Enton’s face, then picked the disks out of the sand, seeming to savor their historic Rafer inscriptions, and tossed them one at a time over the lake. They skipped like smooth stones and disappeared.

“I have killed many Rafers,” the Monitor said gleefully, throwing another disk side-armed, “but not for such a long time.”

It seemed that death was gnawing at his chest like a large rodent, and Tha’Enton set about a final set of stark observations: A smashed Pa, blasphemy to the art of music; sand in his mouth, and blood bubbling up his throat and through his teeth; the discarded quiver, inches from his nose, a finely tooled leather tube that bulbed slightly near the bottom, where he had jammed an odd-sized … unmentionable object.

And to his own horror, that despicable mass of molded metal at the bottom of his quiver became a goal, an object that could wield some small influence on a darkening day. A gun. A device of astounding butchery against his tribe. Sickening weapon of the Fungus People.

Tha’Enton reached. Cracked ribs shifted and scraped like gravel. Pain … does … not … matter.

Near the bottom of the quiver his hand fitted around the evil mechanism, and nausea overlayered the torture of a crushed chest. He pulled weakly. The gun held fast.

The Monitor was watching now, amused, thinking he had emptied the quiver. Tha’Enton had never fired a pistol. Did he have to do more than pull the trigger—find a safety catch, perhaps? Didn’t guns have a safety catch? Where? Could a bullet be accurately fired through hard leather? Was he dying dishonorably, waging final battle with a contemptible firearm?

He pulled again, and the gun would not come free of the quiver. The Defender lifted his arm, carrying the quiver with it. His midsection howled pain. Awkwardly, he tried to estimate the trajectory: from wavering gun barrel to Monitor’s forehead.

Extreme pain can suspend sanity. Sometimes the result is blackout, sometimes hallucination.

As Tha’Enton attempted to aim at the Monitor’s face, the world seemed to tilt out of logical balance. Nature went berserk—he had no other explanation for it.

From high above, over the distant rim of the canyon, came a hellish growl. The Monitor’s smile broadened and he turned his reddened face to see. From this distance, Tha’Enton decided, it looked quite like a Bullet of the Fungus People. A collosal Bullet borne upward out of the rock on a column of flame, slowly edging skyward.

A small panel blasted away from the side of the Bullet, an explosion made noiseless under the howl of the engine. Sparks spewed from the hole, then a furious billow of smoke. The Bullet wavered, and then the entire shaft folded in half and collapsed back to earth.

The giant spash of fire obliterated the trees at the top of the canyon rim where bird people had once perched. Bits of spinning, flaming debris began their long arcing descent through the pure canyon air.

The Monitor crouched and snarled, his upper lip curling back from his teeth in surreal fury over the lost Bullet. Like a slavering boar, the beast crept forward on all fours, fixed upon the flesh of the musician’s neck.

And then Tha’Enton saw the canyon lake come alive, a final rent in the fabric of reality. A dozen square yards of the lake’s surface, once a mirror, now roiled with foam. A woman rose, spiritlike, from the white circle. She was pale skinned, dark red hair an unruly, sopping mane. A giantess. This was the sort of vision, Tha’Enton told himself, that the scriptures spoke of, a stunning power promised by Rutherford Cross himself.

In a lightning flash, the woman burst from the water, mounted atop a streaming rainbow of reds and golds. As she bounded into the sky, Tha’Enton saw more clearly: The woman was straddling an impossibly large fish, a water beast the thickness of three tree trunks, streamer fins flapping like battle banners. The magnificent, writhing dragon fish angrily plummeted to the beach. It bared a row of razor teeth and neatly nipped off the Monitor’s head.

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Now what? The Government has no head.

Damned if I was going to try to haul such a huge corpse, head or no head, up the canyon to bury it. And the beach sand didn’t dig but a few feet before we hit rock. The villagers, quite cooperative considering the mayhem we brought yesterday, supplied us with a dory to haul the body to centerlake, where they say it’s hunnerds of feet down. Tied his ankles to a rock and splashed him in. I’ll never know what his face really looked like.

The birders, while less than friendly, have agreed still to stand watch on the canyon rim. Them that have tongues aren’t speaking too well of this Monitor bugger, nor his bloodsome little sidekick, Loo, who didn’t fare much better when we attacked.

Rosenthal Webb has spent most of his life as a revolutionary, and I suppose has a lot of gully in how things ought to be run—although I ‘spect now he’ll find that sabotage is easier than making things right.

The way the Government has already been set up here, as Webb sees it, will be useful for a month. Webb’s man Gregory, a hillbunkin a little younger to me, has the most mind for this electronics business (claims to know Cred Faiging). He says there is a small bit of power storage, which might hold that long without the turbine.

The turbine’s drubbing, Gregory ‘spects, had something to do with the crash-down of the Monitor’s Bullet. Or mayhaps not. We found papers that show the Monitor had been sending for Cred Faiging, needed him for some drastic reason. Could be the Bullet never was flight ready.

Whatever, I was surprised to be told that the firewhack we witnessed was nay but the Bullet’s fuel expending. Had nothing to do with the atomic banger the ancients had arranged. That mechanism, I gully, is melted amid the wreckage up on the canyon rim, and we’re to avoid the vicinity for a few hunnerd years. I can manage that.

The villagers aren’t fiery about rebuilding the turbine, and don’t seem to want to leave with us either. They have most everything: shelter, food, and water from the lake, little garden patches, year-round summer down this far. It’s as if they’ve shrugged off an employer and are just as happy going independent.

“As long as the work’s no harder…. “one said.

A blase bunch.

It was fiercely talked, but we’ve decided not to announce the Monitor’s death, not for now. The Government is being run smoothly by a llama named Diego, who learned the thinker boxes from the birder named Loo. Rather than scramble New Chicago into chaos, Webb and Diego have laid out a schedule of dismantling that will allow Webb’s people and myself to set on the city and take reins. Then the llamas will return to the mountains. They aren’t much for Governments or things human.

Inspector Kerbaugh we’ll leave here. He likes wearing no clothes and chasing minnows in the shallows. I hope he learns to leave his wenus alone in public.

All of us—except Pec-Pec—were surprised that Tha’Enton survived the Monitor’s drubbing. Those two do have a knowing between them. The Rafer is hobbling sadly but won’t admit to any pain. Webb says Tha’Enton insists he’ll be travel-worthy when he and Gregory leave in a few days. The Rafer is adamant about accompanying them back east. Odd. He was none too companionly on the way out here.

I’ll be leaving about the same time, once I’ve browned my skin a little on the beach. But I will go north, to Blue Hole. Diego is wiring ahead special instructions about the protection and release of Ben Tiggle, if he still lives. Webb says he’s tempted to just order the entire work camp freed, and may do that once he’s studied the inmate roll.

And Nora Londi says she wants to spit every time she smells me. I’ll try again once her fury subsides. She did let on that she’d be making her way back to New Chicago sometime after her baby is born.

Which is the oddest part of these doings: How can a woman know she’s just a day or two pregnant by a man she has never met before? Pec-Pec pulled her from the lake yesterday after she cut the net and fell with the log pile. Everyone is telling this dragon fish tale that I still don’t gully—a monster what was Pec-Pec really, but then again wasn’t—ach. And there beside the Monitor’s fresh corpse Pec-Pec says to her, “You are having my child.” And Londi shook her soggy head yes. I am depressed. Pec-Pec said he did it while doing his mind-float, that he did it as a precaution—ha!—because of something the Monitor was planning. To breed, like a dog, he said.

Pec-Pec looked tired. Said something about having to leave the dragon fish alone for a while, that it was a wilder bugger than he had ever imagined.

Pec-Pec then left the canyon straight away, backpack strapped on—marched right up the rock wall. We’d look up every half hour or so, and his little black figure grew tinier and tinier until he topped the rim just before nightfall. The canyon rim glowed red, and blip he was gone.

I miss Pec-Pec already, and hope to see him again. He left us with these strange words: “Me, I’m gonna rest these ol’ bones now.”

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JEFF BREDENBERG has worked in the publishing industry for more than three decades, writing and editing for newspapers, publishing three novels, and writing how-to and health books. The Dream Compass is his first science fiction novel, the opening book set in the imaginary future Merqua. The second in the series is called The Dream Vessel. His third novel, The Man in the Moon Must Die, is an independent science fiction thriller. Bredenberg lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Learn more about Bredenberg or contact him at www.jeffbredenberg.com and www.howtocheatbooks.com.