Blightborn (25 page)

The Blight is a sickness. A plague put here by Old Scratch and his daughter, the Maize Witch. That’s what folks say. Though when her father was in his cups sometimes, he’d let slip a different idea: that the Empyrean did it to us. “To keep us afraid,” he’d said one time. “Keep us scared so we don’t notice how they’re ruining us all.”

But then her mother would step in, laughing as if it were just a joke or she was just covering up Daddy’s drunkenness—a rare event at the Mecklin house, honestly—and then Daddy would realize it, and he’d laugh, too, and they’d change the subject faster than the grackle flies.

Whatever its origin, the Blight is a disease of the flesh and eventually of the mind. Men are not meant to be a seed-bed for plants. It just isn’t right.

Cael having the Blight means he’ll be exiled. (Though he already is, isn’t he?) A hobo. (He’s one of those, too, right?) And she as his Obligated and eventually his wife . . . she’ll be exiled, too.

She’ll be a hobo.

Her parents will never want to talk to her.

The townsfolk will say, “There goes that Blighted bride again.”

They’ll think she could have it.

And their kids . . .

She reaches out with both hands and grabs the railing of the boat to steady herself, forgetting that they’re not floating
above
the corn but rather
within
it. Corn leaves reach for her and slice paper-thin cuts along the tops of her fingers and her knuckles, and she pulls back—

And bursts out sobbing.

The hobo comes up behind her.

“Don’t cry, Little Mouse,” he says. “It’ll all be over soon.”

Then he whistles a strange, discordant tune and wanders back toward the front of the boat. For some reason it only makes her sob all the harder.

TO LIE DOWN WITH DOGS

THEY LEAVE THE RIFLE
and the whiskey behind, and Killian leads Cael down into the depths of the trawler, out from the rat-room and down another ladder to the belly of the beast.

Cael’s hands are shaking.

Rigo . . .

He doesn’t want to see the body. And yet he feels as if he has to.

He no longer thinks about anything else: not about Gwennie or Wanda, not about Pop or Mom or Lane or the dead men back at the farm. Not about the Blight, either. All he thinks about is Rigo.

And it’s then it hits him:
This is my fault
.

He pushed and pushed. Rigo didn’t need to come along on this adventure. But he was too good a friend, and Cael didn’t have the sense the Lord and Lady gave a corn-weevil to see that
his friend wasn’t up to the task. And then when Rigo got hurt from Eben’s jaw trap . . . again they kept pushing and pushing. Just a hundred more feet. Just another hour. Just another day. All while his leg was messed up something fierce.

They waited too long.

The guilt hits Cael like an auto-train.

Killian pauses before a door. He gives Cael a sympathetic look, a slight tightening of the mouth, a faint downward cast of the eyes.

Then he opens the door.

Rigo sits across the room in a rocking chair, blanket over his lap.

“Cael!” Rigo says, voice hoarse and raggedy. He gives a little wave.

“Sonofabitch,” Cael says.
He’s alive
. “You’re alive.”

He’s about to turn around and haul off on Killian, maybe pop him in the cheek with a hard punch or just slam his head with Cael’s own—but then the fire is sucked out of Cael’s engine as Rigo stands.

Tries
to stand.

He grabs first for a wooden crutch padded at the top with a swaddling of dirty rags, then uses it to pull himself up—

Cael rushes across the room, around a lumpy cot to help—

But it’s too late. The blanket falls off, and when Cael rounds the edge of the bed he sees: Rigo’s wounded leg isn’t healed.

It’s gone.

He’s still got the knee, but the foot and most of the shin are . . .

“I think I lost something,” Rigo says, followed by a weak
heh-heh-heh
. His eyes shine with tears that fail to fall.

“Jeezum Crow, Rigo, I’m so sorry.” Cael helps him get the crutch under his armpit. Then Rigo hugs him. A lingering hug.

Into Cael’s shoulder, Rigo says, “Not your fault, Captain.”

“We’ll get you home soon as we can.”

“Naw, I’m still here. I’m still with you.”

“Rigo—”

“Cael, I lost my leg, but I still have you guys. Losing a limb that’s . . . that’s just life in the Heartland.”

“I . . .”

Killian snaps his fingers, gives a little whistle. “We gave him some Annie pills to keep the infection down. Why don’t we let him recuperate a little, huh, Cael? Give the boy some room.”

Cael stares darkly at the raider but then nods.

“I’ll see you later,” Cael says to Rigo.

Rigo smiles softly—unconvincingly—and sits back down in the rocker. Cael helps him with the blanket and then leans the crutch between the chair and the cot.

Back out in the hallway, Cael grabs hold of the high collar on Killian’s coat and jacks him up against the wall.

“Why’d you cut his damn leg off? And why the hell’d you tell me he was dead?”

The raider just laughs. “Second question first: because I thought it’d be funny, Cael. No sense of humor on you? You do seem awfully serious. Shame—a good laugh can make even the
most dire situation passable.” Cael slams him against the wall again. “As for the
leg
, what would you have us do? The infection had taken hold. Like the roots of a tree crawling up under his skin. Like the Blight, but better because we could solve this problem with the chirurgeon’s saw. Can’t fix the Blight with anything but a bullet and some fire.”

Cael’s grip softens.
The Blight. Rigo. Raiders.
It all seems as if it’s falling away from him—tumbling down, down, down, like falling out of the sky or worse, up into it—out of reach, into the clouds.

He lets go.

Killian dusts himself off, straightens the angles of his long collar. “And here I thought you would’ve been grateful, what with us saving your friend’s life and all.”

“I . . . I am.”

“He says in a small, unconvincing little voice. Let’s try that again with a heaping helping of crow at the end of this fork. Say
Thank you, Killian, for your hospitality and for saving my friend’s life.
”

“You kept me in a room for what felt like forever.”

“We fed and watered you like a good little plant—”
Does he know? Could he possibly know?
“And that
still
doesn’t sound like a thank-you.”

Reluctantly and regrettably he says, “Thank you.”

“Those two words did not
drip
with the gratitude I expected, but for now it’ll do. Let’s go up top, see your other friend—who is not dead, nor is he missing any particularly critical
parts
.”

The sunlight washes out everything: a white wave bleaching his eyesight. Cael holds his hand over his face as he emerges onto the trawler’s deck. And it’s only then that he gets a real sense of the scope of the Sleeping Dogs. The trawler is big, he knew that much, but looking out over the boat he sees dozens of men and women working as part of the crew. A short little ember-spark of a girl spars with a fat man, two oar-poles cracking together. Nearby, a young lad scrubs the deck, showing off an ear that looks less like an ear and more like a little hillock of unformed skin—as if his creator gave up right before finishing the boy. Across the way, the bearded bear with the busted nose—the nose Cael busted—polishes a massive steel gun, an Empyrean sigil gleaming on its side in the noon-day light.

But it goes beyond the borders of this one ship, for all around them fly the boats of this armada: lean-nose pinnace-racers and fat-sailed cat-marans that call to mind Cael’s own boat,
Betty
.

And they fly along like that. As if nobody gives a damn. As if the Empyrean couldn’t stomp down with a big foot at any time, crushing them into the clay and gravel.

Cael’s just about to ask how that’s even possible before he sees someone striding over to him, arms out—

Lane.

The two crash together in a hug. Lane laughs, claps Cael on the shoulder, sticks his ditchweed cigarette back into his mouth, and lets it hang over the ledge of his lip.

“Good to see you, Captain.”

“Captain?” Killian says, standing next to Lane. “They keep calling you that, Cael. You captained a boat?”

“I do.” He clears his throat. “I did.”

“Good to know. Maybe if your friend Mr. Moreau can convince you to stay, we’ll get you piloting a ship before too long.”

Lane gives Cael a look, and it’s then that he notices. Lane looks . . . a little bit like Killian. A few wisps of hair on the sides of his cheeks. No long, red coat but a billowy button-down white shirt with half the buttons undone.

“I’ll leave you to catch up,” Killian says. “I’ve got business with one of my captains. If you’ll excuse me.”

Then, like that, he marches over and grabs a fat-barreled pistol off a peg and jams into it a three-pronged grappling hook. He lifts it without even looking, giving both Cael and Lane a wink and a smirk before—

Foomp!

The grappling hook fires off the side of the trawler.

It catches something on one of the cat-marans—winding around the top of the mast, as far as Cael can tell—and then Killian runs and takes a leap off the edge. Then comes the sound of the wire retreating into the pistol—
vvvvvviiiip!
—and the raider is flung onto the other boat some thirty feet away. It’s all pretty damn crafty, but what’s interesting, Cael thinks, is not what just happened
there
, but what’s happening on Lane’s face.

Lane’s staring off. Smiling.
Admiring
.

“You’ve really bought the buck on this Sleeping Dogs thing,” Cael says.

Lane is jostled out of his reverie; it’s as if he forgot Cael was there. Or that he had a cigarette in his mouth. He takes a long pull and blows two streams from his nostrils like plumes of
steam from a bull’s nose, then laughs. “What can I say? I’m in. You can’t be surprised.”

Cael grunts, starts walking toward the back of the boat. There the corn recedes from them, and somewhere out there, far, far away, is the town of Boxelder. And it’s receding from them, too.

“I guess I’m not,” Cael says. “Can’t say I like it, though.”

“They didn’t need to keep us around. They didn’t even need to let us live, Cael. C’mon.”

“Is that what they did to those other workers at the depot? Kill ’em?”

Lane doesn’t say anything.

“Those people were Heartlanders, Lane. They weren’t Empyrean bootlickers. Just folks trying to do a job.”

“The hell do you stand for?” Lane asks.

“What?”

“You heard me. What. Do you.
Stand for?
Because I just don’t get it. Your pop was running a secret grow operation with a hobo army. He stood for something. He stood against the Empyrean. And now when you’re asked to do the same, you don’t seem to give a rat’s tail.”

Cael barks a mirthless laugh. “Don’t gimme that happy horseshit, Lane, for Crow’s sake. Just because my balls aren’t tickled being among these raider scum-nuggets doesn’t mean I’m sucking on the Empyrean teat, either, okay? I stand for . . . I stand for you, and me, and Rigo. I stand for Pop and Mom and Boxelder and everybody I know and love.”

Lane sneers, flicks his cigarette out into the corn. “You know what I think? I think you stand for
yourself
.”

“Are you drunk? Right now? Like, did you drink a whole bottle of Killian’s skee that set those coals up your ass a-burning?”

“I’m not drunk. I just think—you’re out here because you want to find your girlfriend. That’s really it, isn’t it?”

“Oh, go to hell, Lane. Two weeks with these guys, and you’re already dressing like them. Already got your little”—he reaches up and tugs at the tiny wisps of hair growing on Lane’s cheeks—“your little Killian beard coming in. If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were in love with
him
as much as you were with the raiders in general.”

Lane bristles. “I just admire him.”

“I see that.”

“I don’t know if they killed those people back at the depot. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. But if you work for the Empyrean, you know the drill. You buy the buck from the skybastards, you best accept the consequences.”

“Your mother’s in the Empyrean employ, isn’t she? Is that what you’d tell your mother if you saw her?
Sorry, Mother o’ mine, you best accept the consequences.
Just before you let the raiders take a crack at her? Or would you slit her throat yourself?”

It’s like knocking the chair out from underneath a man about to hang—the fight goes out of Lane. He looks gutshot.

“I’m sorry,” Cael says.

“No, no, it’s . . .” Lane rubs his eyes. “It’s fine.”

“I didn’t mean to bring your momma into this—”

“She’s one of them, not one of us. She made her choice just as I’ve made mine.” The fire is gone from his voice, replaced with a quiet, steely determination. “Cael, if you don’t want to be here, I’m not going to make you stay. I
do
want to be here. But if you
say we go, I’ll . . . I’ll trust you, and we’ll find a way off this boat.” He pauses. “There’s something else. Something I’m supposed to tell you.”