Alexandria (29 page)

“They didn’t. Don’t you listen? They’re trying to help, you want to send them out to get killed?”

“Stop it, Kas. Don’t talk like that.”

“Killed!”
she screams.
“Killed killed killed!”

“Kas,”
the old woman warns.

“We’re not stupid.” She heaves and sways unsteadily, her cheeks flaming with anger. “What are we running from? Ah? You don’t tell us anything, why are we running?” She spits the words out staccato and the whole room watches her outburst.

“This is not the time, Kas. They can stay the night, but they leave at sunrise.”

Kas makes no comment, but relaxes her posture and relents.

“We should go,” Lia says meekly.

“No. You’re staying,” says Kas. Sportive grins break out on the faces of the young flock. “I’m sorry. They mean good, but I know they lie.”

The matriarch watches them heedfully before retiring to the recesses of the mansion. The rest of the adults finish milling around and storing things away, then begin to wander off and disappear down the bleak corridors.

“We said we’d care for these cuts,” says Jinn, breaking the weird tension. “Let me get some things.”

His friend Hilen rises and they go together, whispering and laughing as they fetch supplies from a tent on the near side of the veranda.

“You said you’re running?” Lia asks. “What did you mean?”

“I wish I knew.”

“We never stop moving,” says Tryna. “Since I can remember, we never stay anywhere for long.”

“How do you know you’re running? Lots of people wander.”

“I just know,” says Kas. “They never tell us anything bad. Ever. You’ve seen a lot of bad things, haven’t you?”

Jack and Lia nod.

“We see it,” says Tryna, “we see things when we travel… and I always thought they… they soften everything. There’s more they don’t tell us.”

“Where did you start from,” asks Jack. “Do you remember?”

“Not really. Somewhere way east. My whole life we’ve been moving west, and looking everywhere up and down along the way. It’s supposed to be better here. At least they want us to think that.”

“It’s bad out east?”

“It must be. Most of us are too young to remember, and the older ones don’t talk about it.”

Jinn carries in a bowl of water and a leather flask, Hilen holds a little clay pot and strips of rough-woven cloth.

“It’s not much, but it might help. Take these off,” says Jinn, motioning to their soiled bandages.

They start peeling. The crusted wrappings pull at their scabs and draw fresh spots of blood, and besides the bites and cuts they are covered with a range of welts and bruises. Jinn and Kas clean them with soaked rags until the water in the bowl is opaque with crimson.

“How long were Ethan and Renning here?” asks Jack, wincing as Jinn douses his chest with stinging liquid.

“A few days.”

“Did they say where they were from?”

“Somewhere south, that’s all. They showed us things, they asked a lot of questions, wanted to hear where we came from, where we’re going. We didn’t have much to tell them.”

“What did they show you?”

“How to do
this,”
says Kas, smearing honey from the clay pot over their raw wounds. “It stops you getting sick.”

“They asked if we can plant things,” Tryna adds. “They told us to go east to the valley, but the silent ones don’t trust them.”

“That writing,” says Kas, tapping the pack where they keep the map, “it said something else. Nezra knows… something…”

“Alexandria,” says Lia. “We don’t know what it means.”

“Is it someone’s name?”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a place,” says Jack.

“That’s where you’re going!” Kas sits forward. “What kind of place is it?”

Jack shrugs. “It’s supposed to have answers.”

“To what questions?”

“We’ve heard stories about it, but that’s all.”

“Stories! Do you even know if they’re true?”

“Not really.”

Kas throws her head back and laughs. “Well, I hope you find it.” She and Jinn finish their work and bandage Jack and Lia up with the course fabric, tying off the loose ends. “Here,” says Kas, handing over the leather flask to Jack. “Drink this.”

“What is it?”

“It’s good.”

He drinks the reddish amber liquor and nearly chokes, a tingling hotness spreading down his windpipe. Kas takes it and passes it to Lia.

“Drink,” she says, and Lia does, gasping and fanning her face with her hands.

Jack takes a few apples and wanders over to lonesome Balazir and feeds him one at a time. He crunches sloppily through them and nuzzles against Jack’s honey-reeking chest, and Jinn brings over the supplies to treat his arrow-shot behind.

Kas rummages along a sagging wall for a length of dry wood and twists the rest of the fabric around one end, then wets it with the liquor and touches it to the dwindling flames. Holding her makeshift torch she beckons them forward.

“Come on,” she says, “we have things to show you.”

“You’re crazy,” Cirune says, shaking and drenched in the unabating rainstorm. “We should have took them this afternoon.”

Halis stares at him coldly.

They nest in a cluster of trees, downhill from the arcane mansion, their horses hitched and miserable. Cirune slackens the tourniquet twisted around his thigh and casts it away, then peels back the saturated wrappings and feels gently along the open gash on his leg. His fingertips are coated with fresh smears of blood and heavy raindrops wash them away almost instantly.

“This is stupid. They’re just roaming around, they’re not going anywhere.”

“They are.”

“I shouldn’t have listened to you. We can’t go much farther like this.”

“Get some sleep.”

“How am I going to sleep in this?”

“Then don’t sleep,” Halis barks, “but shut your mouth up.”

“Crazy
. They should never have put you on this brigade. Should’ve known you can’t handle it—you’re wasted in the head, you know that?”

“I said shut your mouth.”

Cirune limps a pace toward Halis. “Our orders are to kill the boy and take the girl, not follow them around for days because you have a
feeling.”

“Turn back then, coward. I don’t need you here.”

“Coward? I’m not the one who’s afraid to go get them.” Cirune clumps forward and stands with his arms folded, surmising Halis from close vantage. “What happened to your face?”

“I’ll kill you if you don’t stop talking.”

“You’ll do no such thing so don’t threaten it. I know your problem—
you fear the boy
. You’re scared he’ll kill you like he did your brother, or tear off the other half of your ugly face.”

Halis charges forward and punches Cirune in the jaw, and Cirune comes right back with a sharp uppercut that sends Halis stumbling backwards.

“A little boy crushed your face and you fear to see him again.
A little boy
, Halis, and you call me the coward. If you can’t beat a boy then you can’t beat me and you’d better not try it again.”

Halis kicks their gear and sends it flying, then throws his head back and screams until every last bit of air is evacuated from his lungs, doubling over and shaking on the ground. Cirune watches in disgust. Out in this dismal environ, soaked to the bone, shot in the leg and stationed with a lunatic. He’ll ride on them tomorrow, he decides, and with all the strength he has left, with or without Halis.

A wretched cry rattles between thunderclaps and dissipates into the surging racket. They stop in the center of the leaking gallery and listen to it fade away.

“Coyote?” asks Lia.

A twitching strobe of lighting strikes nearby, illuminating their faces with blue-white clarity, and the crash that accompanies it shakes the stone floor under their feet, setting the whole mansion alive with creaks and groans. Jack glances up at the high ceiling, swathed over with wisps of cobweb and fungal discolorations, afraid some loose tiles or joists will break loose and crash down. He and Lia step over fallen shards and moldering woodwork and look at the vague designs still showing through on the wall, baroque and complicated. Gilded portrait frames, tilting like parallelograms, the canvases long-since eaten away, spindly columns and wasted furniture, overturned tables with bent metal legs, cracked marble tops. Kas lights a newly swept area where crystal vases and cups are arranged in lines, cleaned and polished, encircled by an odd collection of tarnished silverware and broken ceramic figurines, their rosy smiles fractured and flaking away from protracted neglect. She moves ahead with the torch and the others crowd close behind.

They jag through a short hallway and emerge in a candlelit foyer, vacant of debris, with the front entrance and broad windows covered over with leafy branches and warped planks. No furniture, no rats nests, no salvaged heirlooms. Empty, save for the seven unmoving figures arranged in an arc. In the dimness they appear as sculptures, as if constructed from found objects like the centerpiece in the courtyard. Kas walks around front of them and lights them aglow and still they look carved or cast somehow, delicately whittled for long years by ascetic craftsmen. Their faces bear the deep character of age—thin lips, concave eyes, gray hair touching the floor, and they wear their loose clothing in disordered fashion, slipping and falling off their frail, bony shoulders. They look like they’ve been sitting in this arrangement for Ages, at least since this rotting mansion was first deserted centuries ago during the long lost years of history.

“Did you find them here?”
Jack whispers.

“No.” Kas looks at him sideways. “They’re
family
. We brought them.”

“Oh.”

A few have their eyes closed in repose, and some stare straight forward with unwavering eyeballs that do not flinch or dart when Kas and her small band pass by.

“They don’t talk,” says Jinn. “Not for years.”

“Did something happen to them?” asks Lia.

“I think a lot happened to them,” says Kas. “Our parents won’t tell us and
they
don’t tell anything, not even hello. Ever. But we followed them west. They led us.”

“They walk?”

“Ah yes, they walk. They’ll lead us away from here, too. And soon, I guess… if what you say is true. That there are people coming here that will kill us.”

“How do they know where they’re going?”

Kas just shakes her head. “I don’t even ask anymore. Come on,” she says, pivoting around and heading off in another direction. “We shouldn’t really be in here, I just wanted you to see.”

She leads them down another leaking corridor, stained olive-green with mold, and they enter a different wing. A chandelier lay bent and twisted in the center of the chamber and dark shapes hustle into the shadows as they enter. A bolt of lighting flashes blinding light across the walls, illuminating the imagery painted from floor to ceiling—sparse curved lines, abstract and indiscernible. Another flickering strobe bursts outside and the images reveal themselves with abrupt clarity—tangled human figures, naked and writhing, their enigmatic expressions showing either twisted pleasure or horrifying pain, perhaps both at once. Jack shirks back from the walls, fearing that the thin-lined faces are watching him somehow.

Kas sits on the remaining lower steps of a collapsed staircase and warms her hands together. Roaring wind rattles the gray wooden planks covering the doors and windows and an icy chill swirls around them. The storm is worsening, rain coming down in silver sheets.

“So, this is what
we
think,” she says, and she flashes her eyes toward Jinn, Hilen and Tryna. “Our group used to be very big, and there were more people.”

“A lot of families, living together,” says Tryna. “East.”

“Ah yeah, somewhere east, they say.”

“They talk about what they had.
What they had
… like it was good, like they didn’t want to leave it.”

“But they had to because of something—”

“Something went wrong.”

“What?” asks Lia.

“I think maybe they had a fight,” says Kas. “A fight they couldn’t make up from, and so we left. I think the rest of our family is still living out there somewhere.”