Gods of Earth (5 page)

“I am Hexus. Chance is my brother. He needs help. Only I can help him. He carries illness.”

This was ridiculous: where Chance was broad shouldered and erect, with a square face and dark hair and eyes, this tall and bleached man slouched awkwardly, and his small eyes were a dim red. His jaw was narrow and slight.

But then, in the strange slow light, Sarah felt her will soothingly encumbered, as if pressed down under some soft weight. She could not recall what she had intended to do with the swords. The unman’s words reminded her of other things. He had said
illness
. Illness. She knew about illness.

“Illness killed my mother,” Sarah whispered.

“Yes, that’s right. Like the illness that killed your mother. That illness killed Paul’s parents.”

And she saw it then. The memory flooded over her, shocking, because she had somehow forgotten it. How could she have forgotten that? The Elders had been about to confirm Chance, but then Chance’s father had collapsed, vomiting blood and green bile. It was then that the robed man had come, offering help. Chance had spurned him and fled.

Had the man just been talking? She had missed what he said, listening to her thoughts.

Strange that Chance’s father would have gotten sick so quickly. It had been different for his mother, hadn’t it? She couldn’t recall. That was odd.

“Chance is sick?” she asked.

“Yes. He carries disease.”

That’s right. Chance had looked pale, like her own mother when the sickness had started.

“He is not a Puriman,” the man said. “He should not live among you. He has given all the Purimen a cancer. If we can find him, and catch him, I can cure the others. I can cure your family.”

Her family. “My father and brother?”

“Your father and brother.”

“They’re sick?”

“They have the disease.”

She dropped the swords, which clattered, ringing against each other, on the dirty floor.

“Sick like my mother?”

“Yes. Chance made your mother sick, perhaps.”

She saw her mother again, in her last weeks of life, vomiting mouthfuls of bile and blood into a filthy bucket set beside her on the festering bedsheets. The foul smell of the sick had permeated their house, made Sarah retch and even vomit at unexpected times,
sitting in the kitchen, avoiding her mother, or standing at the front door, hesitating to even enter the house. And then her mother’s long slow death, the agonizing dry heaves that forced up only the thinnest hint of green acid threaded with clotted strings of black blood.

“Oh, no,” Sarah whispered, “oh God, no.” Her father and brother would die like that next. Horrible beyond words, beyond imagining. Chance had caused it. She pictured Chance with green bile on his lips. Did she remember that?

Had the pale unman been talking again?

“I can save them,” Hexus whispered. “You see that I am sick also. I can save myself. But first, I need your help. Chance flees us. When we catch him, we need to convince Chance to come to us, to join us, and I can cure them all.”

“How,” Sarah began, “how can finding Chance cure…?”

“Don’t think of that. Think of your father and brother. Think of finding Chance.”

She nodded. That was right. Think of her father and brother. Think of finding Chance.

“Chance will become more and more dangerous. I am a stranger here. Will you help me? I want to ensure that no one else is hurt.”

“Yes,” she said. Her voice seemed far away. The room, the sounds of it, the sickening smell of Hexus, were all distant, as if experienced by a different person on the horizon of her awareness. “But I don’t know where he is.”

“Oh, there’s only one place they can go,” Hexus said. “We must head north. Chance will flee to Disthea.”

Sarah picked up her swords and sheathed them.

They climbed out of the abandoned farmhouse, leaving behind the stale damp air of the basement for the strong scent of cool lake water, and walked down to the road on the west side of Walking
Man Lake. Sarah knew the place: dozens of times she had ridden past the derelict house they had been in. The road here went all the way to the western foot of Walking Man in the south, or out to the Old Trail in the north. The farmhouses before them were all the homes of Elders.

“That’s Elder Isai’s home,” she said, pointing. It was a small, well-kept white house on the lake shore. A red barn stood by it.

“Do they have horses?” Hexus asked.

“Oh yes.”

“Sit here.”

And she and Paul sat in the dirt. It seemed strange to Sarah, to be sweating in the middle of the road, legs askew, not even looking up to see if someone came along. She had the nagging feeling that she had forgotten something. They sat so still that a robin landed at her feet, poked at the grass by the roadside, and pulled up a worm. Without the unman there talking to Sarah, her head slowly started to clear.

“Paul,” she said. At her voice, the robin hopped back, jealously retreating with its squirming prey. “Paul. What…?”

But she could not form a question. What was it she wanted to know?

“I feel strange, Sarah,” Paul said. “Are we lost?”

“I think…” she began.

“You were angry when I kissed you.” Paul stared at the road before his feet. “But you were so beautiful. Turning in place.”

Sarah squinted, trying to gather her thoughts.

That had been just the day before. She’d not wanted to have dinner with Paul but her father had arranged it. Paul had arrived wearing a too-large suit, but laughing at himself with good humor. “My Sunday suit seems to have walked off on its own,” he’d said. Later, sitting across from her at the table, without Chance there as goad and measure, he did not have his usual defiant familiarity. He spoke respectfully to her, and answered a long series of questions
from her father about growing Ries vines, while they ate bread and a pork roast that Sarah and her grandmother had prepared.

Paul had seemed like his father, John Kyrien: jovial, smiling, but always talking with a hint of seriousness. He had even shocked Sarah by crediting Chance.

“How do you handle the black rot? Pull or burn?” her father had asked.

“Well, sir,” Paul said, “I was inclined to pull the leaves and shoots and grapes that got the rot. But my brother Chance insisted that we burn whole vines. I think now he’s probably right. He’s got a real good sense for Ries vines.”

He looked over at Sarah as he said this, and she nodded, as if to say, here’s to you, Paul Kyrien.

After the meal and a long conversation about lake fishing, her father had conspicuously stayed seated by the hearth, filling another pipe, as Paul rose to go. It fell to Sarah to see the boy off. She walked Paul out onto the grass before their house. The day was cool but the sun shone warm on her.

“I thank you for the fine meal, Sarah,” Paul had said again.

“You are welcome. Thank you for the wine.”

“We have plenty of wine,” he joked.

She nodded. “I have to make a quick patrol today,” she had said, turning slightly in place to make her skirt twist back and forth. “Tell Chance I may be a bit late to his baptism.”

Then Paul had stepped forward and kissed her. Shocked, not wanting to draw attention, she had not cried out, but just stepped back. Paul took another step and kissed her again, hard on the lips.

If it had not been for her father, if it had not been that this boy was their guest, she might have struck him. Instead, angry at herself for letting him take advantage, she had pushed him away. She had opened her mouth to rebuke him, thought better of it, and only hurried into the house.

Her father had not questioned why she had hurried past him and into her room, to change into her Ranger garb.

Sarah frowned now. Something was odd.

Her father! He was not sick! He had sat at the dinner table eating and was not sick. Her brother had been there too—healthy, smiling.

Relief swept through her. She reached her hand out into the dust and seized Paul’s hand. His fingers gripped hers.

“We have to…” Paul whispered, his voice straining, “to get up.…”

“Yes,” Sarah said. She leaned forward slightly. Her legs did not want to obey her. But slowly, slowly her knees bent.…

Then Hexus returned with three horses, leading them by the reins. “Stand up.”

Sarah’s thoughts fled. She and Paul stood.

“Isai gave you horses?” Sarah asked.

“I showed them it was better to help me. Now get on. We ride to the Usin Valley, and then on to Disthea.”

Sarah mounted the horse. “I’d like to see the great river,” she said, staring at nothing.

“You will see many things,” Hexus told her. “Some you will even remember.”

They rode off, leaving only dust behind.

CHAPTER

6

I
must escape, Chance thought.

The persistent morning mosquitoes gave up as the day turned unseasonably hot. His clothes dried. The dark red wood of the seats grew scalding to the touch. Chance had no hat and he began to sweat. He had not broken his fast, and a dull, pounding pain took hold of his head.

The river grew more swift. Its water roiled and at places foamed over rocks, driving quickly to the west. The Guardian continued rowing at his same pace, his strokes compounding now with the current to drive the boat at a frightening speed. Chance gritted his teeth in frustration. With every mile that passed, he grew more angry with himself for not having leapt out of the boat and run for the forest, and yet, given how quickly the Guardian could move, he knew at each opportunity, each shallows or bend, that escape was hopeless.

Chance’s father had told him that the waters of Walking Man Lake flowed into the Kilter, then into another mighty river, and ultimately all the way to the Western Salt Sea, someplace far north of Disthea, the Sunken City.

“Will we take the river to the sea?” Chance asked.

The Guardian just hammered at the water with the oars.

“Will we take this boat all the way to Disthea? Or will we leave off and walk when we are closest to the city?”

The Guardian did not answer.

Chance felt the urge to scream in rage at the unman. He decided then on his course of action: when they first hit deep water, he would leap onto the gunwale and jump from the boat, tipping it, and swim ashore. The unman, he was sure, would not be able to swim but would sink like a stone.

But Chance would have to wait until they were much farther. Nowhere did the fast Kilter run deep enough to sink a man. It raged along through narrow valleys, skimming perilously over pebbled flats, or splitting over stout boulders, but never flowed more than waist-high.

In a place where the stream was broad and shallow, the Guardian climbed out of the boat and dragged it, scraping, into the center of low, gurgling shallows. The boat stopped. Chance watched the Guardian let go of the prow. He bowed to pick a smooth, round stone, the size of a fist, out of the river. He held the stone behind him. Then he moved so fast the motion was invisible: the next instant his arm was above and before him, hand outstretched, fingers open, the stone gone.

Chance looked up at the sky, trying to see where the Guardian had hurled the rock. A few seconds later a distant crack sounded out. That fixed his eyes in the right direction, and he saw two black things falling: one, dropping straight down, was the stone. The other fluttered and twisted in the air, dropping more slowly. It splashed into the water a few hundred paces ahead.

“What was it?” Chance asked. The Guardian said nothing but pulled the boat out of the shallows, stepped in, and began
methodically rowing. When they came to the bend where the thing had fallen, the Guardian stepped out. He reached into the stream, scattering schools of silver sucker fish that turned in jittery synchronized abruptness, and pulled out a limp black form, dripping with cold water.

“It’s a bird,” Chance said.

No, not a bird, Chance realized. It was metal, and some other material. Black and dark gray and burnished silver. In place of a head was a cylinder with a single glassy lens. But the body seemed otherwise like a metal crow, with feathers of deepest, shining black.

“What was it?” Chance whispered. Then he sat up in surprise as the head turned and the black lens aimed at him. The wings twitched.