Coyote Rising (44 page)

“Why don’t you go back yourself and . . .”

“They’re fast. Believe me, they’re already way ahead of us. If we follow them now, we may be able to catch up to them. But if we go back to town, they’ll have that much more of a head start. And Ben can’t keep up with us, not with that bad foot of his.” He pointed back the way we’d come. “Now move . . . and get back here quick as you can.”

Marie hesitated, then turned and began to sprint back toward town. “C’mon,” Carlos said, taking my arm. “We don’t have much time.” He glanced at me, saw the look on my face, and nodded. “I’ll try to explain as we go along.”

Three and a half years ago, by the LeMarean calendar, Carlos had
taken off by himself to explore the Great Equatorial River. I’ve told my part of that story before; how he’d left me, Barry, Chris, and Kuniko behind after our attempt to explore the river had failed. I was carrying Susan then, so I couldn’t go with him—not that I particularly wanted to; Carlos and I weren’t on good terms at that point in our relationship—and so for nearly three months he was on his own, not returning to Liberty until I was going into labor.

I thought I’d learned everything about that
hegira
—his term for his “spiritual journey”—but I was wrong. There was one thing he’d kept secret, not only from me, but also from everyone else.

He’d paddled his canoe along the southern coast of Midland, seeing our future homeland as no other human had ever seen it before, until he reached its southeast point. Following a brief conversation via satphone with me and Chris—and I hate to admit it, but we weren’t very kind to him—he decided to keep going west, raising his sails to cross the
Midland Channel to a small island south of Hammerhead. At first, it seemed as if the island was little more than sand and brush, yet on his first night there he discovered that it was far from deserted.

“I thought they were just animals.” As he spoke we were hiking uphill, following the tracks as we made our way through dense forest toward the lower slopes of Mt. Bonestell. “Like raccoons or maybe overgrown pack rats, but then I found something that made me realize that they were intelligent. There was this tiny knife—”

“What?” Despite the urgency of the moment, I stopped. “You’re saying you found intelligent life on Coyote?”

He looked back at me. “Uh-huh. That’s what I’m saying. Now c’mon.” Still talking, he continued up the trail. “Intelligent, but very primitive . . . sort of like little Cro-Magnon men. They knew how to make tools, how to build fires, erect structures from the sand. Even something of a language, although damned if I could understand it.” He chuckled to himself. “And, man, were they a pain in the ass. I spent nearly a week on the island, and it was all I could do to keep them from stealing everything I had. I called them sandthieves after a while. But they were pretty peaceful. Just as curious about me as I was about them.”

“And you didn’t tell anyone about them?” If the circumstances had been different, I would have had a hard time believing him.

“No, I didn’t. I . . . oh, no. Look at this.”

We’d come to Longer Creek. It wasn’t very wide at that point, its surface frozen over, but that wasn’t what distracted him, Susan’s footprints stopped abruptly on its bank. Carlos bent over, picked up something from the ground, turned around, and held it out to me.

“Oh, God!” I whispered, putting my hand to my mouth. It was Susan’s cap, the one Sharon had woven from shag fur and given to her for First Landing Day last summer. “Is she . . . ?”

Carlos knelt, inspected the smaller tracks within powdery snow on top of the ice that lay across the shallow creek. “No. She’s still with them. They just picked her up to carry her across. She probably tried to fight, and that’s how her cap got knocked off.” He took a few tentative steps out on the ice; it groaned a bit, but remained solid. “We can make it across,” he said, offering his hand. “Let’s go.”

We carefully walked across the creek, trying to avoid soft spots in the ice; when we were on the far side, the tracks continued, Susan’s among them. I could see Mt. Bonestell clearly through the trees, looming above us as a massive, snowcapped dome. “Go on,” I said. “Give me the rest of it.”

“Not much more to tell.” Carlos shrugged as he continued to lead the way. “They’re intelligent, no question about it. But I was pretty cynical about everyone I’d left behind, and I didn’t want all these people descending upon them, the way European explorers did to the Native Americans, so I kept it to myself. Even named the place Barren Isle so that no one would think anything important was there. And I haven’t told anyone until now.” He looked back at me. “You’re the first.”

“But if they’re peaceful—”

“I
thought
they were peaceful.” He stopped, bent over to clasp his knees and catch his breath. “But these aren’t the same sandthieves. The ones I found over there didn’t know how to swim or build boats, so they couldn’t have come over here. And if everyone says they’re the size of monkeys, then this bunch must belong to a different species, or tribe, or”—he shook his head—“whatever. The ones I met weren’t that large. But they must be just as intelligent, and if they’ve taken Susan . . .”

“Let’s go.” I didn’t need to hear any more; I pushed past him, taking the lead. My daughter had been abducted by these creatures. I didn’t care how peaceful their relatives on Barren Isle might be; I wanted her back.

The slope quickly became steeper, the snow more thick, yet urgency pumped adrenaline into my blood, making me forget the cold in my lungs and the ache in my muscles. More than once I was tempted to stop for a moment, take a break, but then I’d look down at the ground to see Susan’s small footprints surrounded on either side by those of the sandthieves, and my steps would quicken. That, and the realization that we
had
to be catching up to them. Carlos said the sandthieves were fast, and doubtless they were strong enough to scurry up a mountainside without breathing hard. Yet they had a human child among them; even if they were forcing her to run, her very presence would slow them down. And twice already Susan had tried to escape; if they were half as
intelligent as Carlos said, then they’d realize the need to keep a close eye on her, and that would slow them down even more.

So we couldn’t be far behind. And as it turned out, we weren’t.

So intent were we upon following the tracks, we didn’t look up to notice that the mountainside had changed, until I raised my eyes and saw a massive bluff looming before us. At first I thought it was another limestone formation, like those prevalent throughout Midland, yet as we came closer, I saw that it was dark grey rock. Much later, talking it over with Fred LaRoux, I’d learn that this was ignimbrite, volcanic ash left behind by ancient eruptions that had been compacted over time to form a substance much like concrete. Sometimes called tuff, it had often used on Earth as construction material. In parts of China, houses were built of bricks carved from ignimbrite quarries, but in northern Italy the opposite approach had been taken, with homes and shops being excavated within tuff deposits.

That’s what we were seeing now. The vast rock wall rose above us, and within that wall were dozens of doors and windows, resembling natural caves, until I realized that their shapes were much more regular, their distance from one another obviously deliberate. The trees around the wall had all been cut down; here and there along the wall I spotted small wooden platforms jutting out from above-ground doorways to form terraces. Rough fabric, like woven grass, covered some of the windows as curtains, while smoke from fires burning somewhere inside seeped through chimney holes here and there.

It looked somewhat like an ancient Pueblo cliff dwelling, yet that wasn’t my first impression. What I saw was a fortress, hostile and impregnable, somehow obscene. And from behind all those doors and windows, eyes that studied us as we emerged from the woods.

Carlos stopped. “That’s far enough,” he said quietly, almost a whisper. “They know we’re here.” He nodded in the direction of the nearest window. “See? It’s hard to sneak up on them. Probably heard us coming a long time ago.”

I caught a brief glimpse of a tiny face—coarse black fur surrounding overlarge eyes and a retracted snout—before it disappeared. Here and
there, I spotted small figures within doors and windows, vanishing as soon I looked directly at them. We were watching them, but they’d been watching us for much longer.

And not just watching. The air was still and quiet, scarcely a breeze moving through the trees behind us. Now I could hear a new sound: a rapid cheeping and chittering, punctuated now and then by thin whistles and hoots, animalistic yet definitely forming some sort of pattern. They were talking to one another.

“Oh, crap,” I murmured. “What do we do now?”

“Stay calm.” Carlos pointed to the tracks we’d been following. They led away from us, straight toward a doorway at ground level. “She’s somewhere in there. They must have just taken her inside.”

So what do we do now? Charge into an alien habitat in search of our daughter? Fat chance. From the looks of it, the cliff dwelling could have been honeycombed with dozens of passageways, all of which so small that we’d have to bend double just to get through the largest of them. We were unarmed, and Carlos had already discovered that these creatures were capable of making knives. A small cut from a tiny flint blade might not mean much, but a hundred such cuts just like it would kill you just the same. Negotiation? Sure, sounds good to me. What’s the word for hello? So I did what any mother would do.

“Susan!” I shouted. “Susan, can you hear me?”

I stopped, listened. Silence, save for the cheeps and chirps of the cliff dwellers. I raised my hands to my mouth. “Susan? Sweetie-pie, do you hear me?”

“Susan!” Carlos yelled as loud as he could. “Susan, we’re out here! Answer us, please!”

We shouted and screamed and called her name again and again, then we’d stop and wait, and still we heard nothing. In the meantime, the sandthieves were becoming a little braver. Apparently realizing that we weren’t about to storm their habitat, they ventured to the windows and stood in the doors, cheeping madly at one another until it almost sounded as if they were mocking us. And maybe they were; one of them, a little larger than the others and wearing what looked like a
serape, stood on an upper parapet and jumped up and down, hooting in glee. Frustrated, I picked up a stick and wound back to hurl it at him.

“No!” Carlos snatched the stick from my hands. “It’ll only excite them. Trust me, I’ve tried that already.”

“Trust you?” I turned upon him. “Why didn’t you trust
me
? If you’d only told me . . . if you’d just been honest . . .”

“I didn’t know . . . I didn’t think they—”

“Mama!”

The sound of Susan’s voice stopped us. For a moment, we couldn’t tell where it was coming from, except that it was in the direction of the cliff dwelling.

“Susan!” I shouted. “Baby, where are you?” I could see nothing in the windows except sandthieves; yet they’d suddenly gone silent, and even the big one on the parapet was now longer prancing. “Susan? Can you—?”

“Here! I’m up here!”

I raised my eyes to peer at the top of the bluff, and there was Susan, a small figure standing alone at the edge of a wooden platform. My heart froze when I saw her. She was nearly sixty feet above the ground. Two or three more steps, and she’d fall over.

“Stay there!” Carlos yelled. “I’m coming to get you!” I couldn’t see how he could, yet he was determined to try anyway. He’d taken no more than a few steps, though, when another voice came to us from above:

“Stay where you are!”

Looking up again, I saw a human figure standing next to Susan. No, not quite human; with great wings like those of a bat rising from his back and fangs within an elongated jaw, he resembled a gargoyle. Although I’d never laid eyes upon him before, I immediately knew who he was. And so did Carlos.

“Zoltan,” he whispered.

Zoltan Shirow. The Reverend Zoltan Shirow, if you cared to call
him that. Founder of the Church of Universal Transformation, the religious cult that had followed him to Coyote. They’d worshiped him as a prophet, believing that he held the key to human destiny, yet the truth of the matter was that he was a madman, and the only destiny to which he’d led them was death.

The last person to see Zoltan alive was Ben Harlan. From what he’d told me and the other members of the Defiance Town Council, he’d fled for his life when it became apparent that Zoltan intended to kill him on Mt. Shaw. He later led an expedition to the camp just below the summit, where they confirmed that the group had resorted to cannibalism. Zoltan’s own remains were never found, and the body count had come up short by two. Since then there had been reports, delivered occasionally by hunters who’d ventured into the Gillis Range, of a bat-winged figure lurking within the woods, sometimes with a woman beside him.

No one had ever given much credence to these claims, least of all me. Yet there was Zoltan, alive and well, standing next to my little girl. Even from the distance, I could tell Susan was badly frightened; she didn’t want to be anywhere near him, yet she was all too aware that she was standing close to the edge of the platform.

“Don’t you dare . . .” My voice was a dry croak; I had to clear my throat. “Don’t you dare hurt her!” I shouted. “Bring her down from there!”