Wind-Scarred (The Will of the Elements, Book 1) (26 page)

The little girl nodded and closed her eyes,
reciting, “And in those days, Fire did stir the hearts of men to
wickedness. And then did Lightning descend to deliver them from
their sinful ways. 'Out,' he commanded in a voice that shook the
heavens and made the earth cringe, 'you shall not corrupt my
people!' And Fire did come forth against him. But mighty Lightning
cast her away, driving her across the land. And the line of blight
was carved across the face of the world, that all may look on it
and know the truth.” She smiled up at Ezra, “I can remember the
Will real good.”

“
That is very impressive, Kelly. Do you think you could tell me
more about the Will later?” Maybe this mystery religion was the key
to whatever Gaav had been talking about the day before. He had to
find out more.

“
Well, you're sick, so I'm not supposed to bother you,” she
dragged the tip of her foot across the floor, the very picture of a
bored kid. “Plus I have chores to do, and papa says we need to make
sure Daniel's eating lots 'cus he's real skinny.”

“
That's all right,” Ezra smiled, taking a sip from the steaming
bowl, “maybe next time.” He blew on the broth to cool it
down.

Kelly nodded, eyes fixed on the wall
distractedly, then she skipped to the door. She paused there, half
out of view, and said, tentatively, “Ezra?” she waited until he
looked over at her. “Thank you.” She quickly vanished through the
doorway, her footsteps retreating down the hall to the stairs
beyond.

Ezra smiled to himself. Maybe he really
didn't need to find out anymore right now. Maybe he knew just
enough.

==

“
I
wish I knew how to do something useful,” Ezra grumbled as Mat and
Sarah joined him with their lunch.

“
What do you mean?” Mat asked between bites of what looked like
a real pork sandwich. Ezra had never even heard of anyone eating
real pork anymore, just the recycled and synthesized stuff he'd
known all his life. He scowled at his teammates. They were getting
all the good food, too.

“
You know, like all that medical stuff you can do. Where did
you learn that?” He turned to Sarah as she idly picked apart a
baked potato. “And where did you learn to make glass? Does the
Guild have some kind of special training program that I don't know
about?”

Mat laughed. “The Matananes have always been
in medicine, man. I'm the black sheep of the family with my
electrical engineering obsession.” He took a long drink of water.
“But I know just enough to get by. You should see what my sisters
can do with a needle and some string. It's practically art compared
to my bone sawing.”

“
It's a family tradition that we learn to work with our hands
and make things the old fashioned way,” Sarah shrugged
indifferently. “Back when Finley Hughes founded the family, he told
his son, 'If I can't trust you to make something mankind has been
making for thousands of years correctly, how can I trust you with
the secrets that make our family great?'” She snorted out a laugh.
“Of course, we didn't
have
many secrets back then, but the tradition
stuck.”

Ezra shook his head. “I don't know how to do
anything useful or special like that.”

Sarah gave him a quizzical look. “You're
joking, right?”

“
No, I really wish I had spent some time working with my hands
or picking up a trade. Maybe when we get back to Sanctuary you guys
can show me a thing or two-”

Mat grabbed Ezra by both
shoulders, interrupting him. “Ezra, I'm going to say this slowly so
you get it: you are the
only
person alive who knows how to make
wormholes
. You regularly
bend what the rest of us see as the absolute laws of physics, and
play with space and time like they were made just for
you.”

“
Well, yeah,” Ezra squirmed uncomfortably, “but you know,
that's just math, a little science, really. Anyone could do
that.”

Mat and Sarah looked at each other for a
moment, then burst out laughing. Ezra couldn't help but join in
after a few seconds. “I'm sure you'll find some way to help,” Mat
said breathlessly.

Sarah wiped tears from her eyes as she stood
up. “Come on Mat, some of us have 'special' things to do, things
that mere wormhole craftsmen couldn't possibly understand.” She
patted Ezra's leg and hiccuped a little as they walked from the
room. “Can't do anything useful,” Ezra heard her choke out in the
hallway, followed by a fresh round of howling laughter from
Mat.

Ezra rubbed his eyes and stared out the
window again, following the streams and pools of water coming off
the blight line for the thousandth time. He reached the edge and
frowned as he caught a glimpse of water running past the rocks and
toward town. On closer inspection, he saw that hundreds of tiny
streams were flowing across the already soaked earth. In fact,
there were men down at the town's edge piling up sandbags to hold
back a small but incessant flood. Ezra suddenly had an idea.

==

Mat and Sarah returned with dinner to find
Ezra on the floor, industriously working to fill it with
painstakingly exact equations and diagrams. Mat followed the trail
of Ezra's work across the floor and up the wall next to the window,
letting out a low, impressed whistle. “That sure is a lot of...
well, a lot of something. Where did you even get chalk?”

Ezra finished his line, swiveled his head to
glance at his friends in the doorway and blinked at the food. “Oh,
thanks.” He grabbed the plate from Mat's hand and began tearing
into a slice of bread as he consulted the display on the wormhole
controller, which he had appropriated for some of the more
demanding calculations. “Now I think...” he glanced out the window
and made a deft adjustment. “Yes, this should just about do it.”
Keying in the final variable brought up a holographic display of a
grid, various sectors highlighted and numbered across its surface.
“That'll be enough.” He nodded to himself in satisfaction, meal
already forgotten.

“
Ezra,” Sarah said slowly, “what are you doing
here?”

“
Oh, hi!” he said brightly to Mat and Sarah, as if seeing them
for the first time. “Well, I was thinking, and like you said all I
really know is the physics behind wormholes, so I thought to
myself, why not try to map out the area of the town? Given the
semi-random division of buildings as a sector map, it was fairly
trivial using Higgs boson resonance. Since my wormhole generator
already searches out the most likely quantum tunneling route, it
was practically a joke to use it for something as mundane as mass
estimation. But you see, it all comes down what we know about
earth-crowned; Gaav in particular, along with the fundamental
composition of the earth under the town. From there, it was just
math. And I can do math!” He grinned proudly up at them from his
place on the floor.

Mat reached forward and placed a hand on
Ezra's forehead, frowning. “He doesn't feel much warmer than this
morning,” he muttered quietly to Sarah, “but maybe his brain cooks
at a lower temperature than a normal person's.”

Sarah sighed and rubbed the bridge of her
nose. “I get that you're very proud of... something here, Ezra. But
some of us have been working hard all day and would have
appreciated a place to sit that isn't covered in chalk.” She held
out the cup she had brought along and dropped it, splashing Ezra
with cider as it hit the floor, then turned and left.

“
Don't you see?” He turned to Mat, confusion and excitement
flashing over his features. “I mean, I know I can't do the kind of
things you guys can do, but I solved the problem! It really wasn't
that hard, once I looked at it from the right-”

“
That's nice Ezra,” Mat patted Ezra on the head and chuckled a
little. “See you in the morning.” He closed the door gently on his
way out.

“
Well then...” Ezra looked over his calculations again,
absently toying with the cup of cider. A grin slowly spread across
his face. “Stand back everyone,” he whispered to himself, “I'm
going to try science.”

“
Gaav,” Ezra whispered, “Gaav, you awake?” The giant didn't
stir.
Well
, Ezra
thought,
it's not like I was very loud. I
wouldn't be surprised if he just didn't hear me.

“
Hey... hey Gaav, are you awake? I need to ask you
something.”

One of the earth-crowned's eyes slowly
opened to glare at Ezra. “Ezra,” he rumbled menacingly, “is the sun
up?”

Ezra looked out the window, then realized
that it was facing west. He checked the display on his wormhole
device. Two in the morning. “Well, somewhere it must just be...” He
trailed off as Gaav literally growled at him. “No, no the sun is
not up.”

“
Then why are you?” Gaav rolled over so his back was to
Ezra.

“
Wait, I need to ask you something! When we first ran into you,
you had raised a wall of rock in front of us. Well, maybe it wasn't
all rock, I mean you could have supplemented the internal
composition with some sort of substrate mixture to make it more
flexible, since you didn't know how heavy the skiff was or what
kind of momentum it was carrying. Or we could have been weaponized!
There might have been some kind of force field running to keep
things like giant walls of rock from stopping it, but many little
impacts from gravel or sand could have overwhelmed the inertial
compensators and then-”

“
Babble in the morning,” Gaav groaned, “just go somewhere else
now.”

“
But in the morning there will be lots of people who want to
talk to you, and this is really important, so I just thought that I
should-”

“
Other things are important too. Like sleep.”

“
And I know that what everyone else has to say is important
too, but I really think you're all missing the big picture here. We
have a chance to really help these people by doing something that
they couldn't do for themselves-”

“
Ezra!” the earth-crowned snapped, sitting up abruptly and
turning toward him. Ezra shut up. “I will answer your question or
listen to...whatever that was in the morning. Good night.” Gaav
laid back down and deliberately closed his eyes.

Several moments passed in silence. “You're
not going to leave, are you?” he asked in a defeated tone, eyes
still closed.

“
Oh,” Ezra got up from the floor, dusting off his pants,
“Sorry, I can wait in the hall.”

Gaav sighed explosively. “I don't think I
could get a decent sleep now anyways.” He rubbed his eyes and
yawned. The bed protested loudly as he sat up, swinging his legs
over the side and resting his feet on the floor. “Yes, I raised a
wall to stop you. I don't know about the other things, it was just
a wall from whatever rocks and clay were in the area.”

“
Clay! I should have thought of that, but that makes sense...
so, in total, you must have moved, what...” he pulled up his
holographic display and started adjusting variables, “Six, six and
a quarter cubic tons?”

“
Holy Mother of the Elements!” Gaav swore, leaping back and
knocking the bed against the far wall.

“
Yes, yes, I know,” Ezra made some consolatory motions with his
hands, “the cubic ton is an antiquated measurement, but it seemed
like a good way to look at it, especially considering I'm
estimating here to begin with. I mean, it was dark and raining,
plus we were running for our lives. But using something with some
real meaning would have been lending a feel of accuracy to my
calculations which are, at best, educated guesswork. And my father
always told me, if you're going to estimate, use made-up units so
that everyone knows you're only estimating.” He shrugged. “But I
can see how that would upset you. I don't even want to think about
what Sarah would do if she heard I was throwing around a term like
'cubic tons'. I've heard the stories about the Hughes Legacy and
solid measurements.” Ezra nodded knowingly.

“
No... what?” Gaav pointed at the hologram floating above
Ezra's generator. “That, what is...why is it glowing like that? Is
this some sort of...” He looked around the room warily, then fixed
Ezra with a piercing stare, “Are you tampering with the laws of
nature?”

“
Tamper...” Ezra glanced down at the display in front of him.
“Oh, this? It's not like... well, no, I guess you wouldn't have...
look, it's just like a, um...chalkboard! You know what a chalkboard
is, right?”

Gaav nodded his head carefully, eyes darting
furtively to the wormhole device in Ezra's hand.

“
Yes, you see this is just like a chalkboard, where I can put
down ideas and keep track of things. Just a tool. A really good
tool. I mean, it'd have to be, what with finding quantum pathways
to tunnel through the fabric of reality at the drop of a...” Ezra
watched as Gaav began to tense up. “Chalkboard! Just a fancy
chalkboard, that's all! Look!” He waved his hand back and forth
through the display. “Just a little light, nothing to be afraid of,
completely harmless.” He gave Gaav a winning smile, holding the
controller casually.