The Harvest (14 page)

“I just met with him.” Arthur hesitates, but then says: “I know him. He grew up with my son. He’s a good kid, but . . . out of his depth.” Leaving Rigo behind pains him far worse than the bone spurs at his hip ever could. And it was clear that Rigo didn’t want to stay, either. But that was the arrangement they made: If things went south with Lane, as Arthur feared they would, Rigo had to stay behind. Arthur would be in touch with him soon.

“We were young once.”

“We were, at that.”

They clink jars and both polish off the fixy. Tastes like corn, cuts like razors. Appropriate, perhaps, given Hiram’s Golden Prolific with its thirst for blood and its slashing corn-leaves.

“The rest of the seven,” Pressman says. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“I think so.”

“Black Horse.”

Arthur winces at the name. “Eben Henry.”

Pressman spits into his glass, scowls. “Long may Old Scratch fill his every space with burning ash and biting ants.”

“That’s if he’s dead. Heard stories he’s still out there.”

“He was. He was looking for you, I’m told.”

Arthur straightens up. “For me.”

“Mm-hmm. Can’t tell me that’s a surprise. He cut Charlie up in a washtub. Shot Neddy in the dang back.” He puts the root back in his mouth, chews on it. “But now they’re ghost stories, because Eben Henry is gone from this Heartland, moved on to whatever waits for him in King Hell.”

Pressman must see Arthur’s face, because he adds: “They found his body, Arthur. Some say the Maize Witch done it. Trussed him up out there at the edge of the dead corn, body swollen with roots pushing in and out of him. But some passersby said he had another wound, like someone stuck him with a knife.” He shrugs. “Who knows, maybe it’s all a legend. Maybe he’s been dead for years. Maybe he’s still out there. Can’t be bothered by spooky stories.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

Still. Eben Henry. Been a long time. Once they’d been so close. But Eben had other ideas about how things had to be.

It stays with Arthur, even now.

“I guess you came here for something,” Pressman says.

“I did. You still have it?”

“Of course. Ned told me to hold on to it and so I did.”

“You could keep it.”

“Eh. Pshh. Wouldn’t know what to do with it. My scrapping days are done. Me and Kallen, we ain’t young. Worst we’re gonna do to someone is hit ’em across the back of the head with a shovel, and then I’m outta tricks. You hold on, I’ll go get it.”

He disappears into the other room, comes out a couple minutes later. He returns with a rosewood case, big as Arthur’s lap. He sets it down and hands over a little golden key.

“There you go, Swift Fox,” Pressman says. “A gift from my cousin, Iron-Red Ned Pressman.”

Inside is a gun.

Not a sonic shooter, but a long iron revolver. The back of the barrel pregnant with a cylinder thick as Arthur’s wrists. It’s not just a gun; it’s a damned hand-cannon. Ned was a gentle heart for the most part, but he said that when he carried a gun, he expected it to get the job done and then some.

Below it is emblazoned a name, inked on a slip of parchment and pinned to the felt.
Heavenkiller
.

Arthur doesn’t know that he’ll need this. Certainly it’s not the way he wants things to go: The Heartland plunging into violence will do nobody any good. People start lighting fires, the whole place will burn, and before long they’ll be stacking up bodies of good people like cords of pulpwood.

Just the same, if he needs it, he wants to be ready.

“Thanks,” he says, closing the box and snapping it shut.

“Ammunition is just underneath it. Lift out the tray, and there’s just shy of a hundred rounds of .50–70 rounds. Ned’s special bison-killers.”

Not that any of them have ever seen a bison. By the time Arthur was born into this world, the bison had already been dead for forty years.

“You could come with me,” Arthur says, standing up.

“What? Come on down to—shoot, where you at now?” But before Arthur can speak, Pressman shakes his head. “You know what, don’t tell me. We ain’t coming, and I don’t wanna know in case the Empyrean think I do. We have a home here. We’re tired.”

“Speak for yourself,” Kallen calls from the kitchen, then comes out, flinging a rag over her shoulder. She’s a stocky woman, built like a broad maple tree. Pretty eyes, though. Gray as a storm cloud, but bright, too, like the sun’s poking out behind the troubled skies. “You leaving, Arthur?”

“I suppose I am. Sadly. Thank you for dinner.”

“It’s not a thing. We’re happy to have company these days.” She sniffs. “World’s coming apart at the seams.”

Arthur shrugs. “Maybe that’s a good thing.”

“Hey, lemme ask you. You really got Blighters working for you?”

“I do. Good people.”

“They’re not all going crazy or anything?”

“Nope. Long as they’re working the soil and tending to plants, that seems to keep the . . . noise at bay.” He hesitates to mention that they don’t even need seeds anymore. The Blightborn have learned to produce the seedlings themselves.

From their own flesh.

“You see what that one Blighter did earlier today?”

Arthur
hmms
. “We talking Esther? The witch?”

“No, nuh-uh, a boy. And a girl, too, actually. Here, I’ll show you.”

Pressman rolls his eyes. “Oh, by the old gods and the new, woman, don’t bring that thing out again.” But it’s too late, because here she comes with a visidex she dug out of a small trunk in the corner of the room. Pressman looks at Arthur and he says, “I think the Empyrean spy on us with those things. They aren’t just letting us have these toys—oh, sure, sure, they say they come from that fallen city of theirs, but I don’t buy it, I think they’re—”

Kallen grunts and just thrusts the visidex between them. “The show is queued up, just hit the funny little triangle button there.”

And then Arthur sees.

A young man and a young woman.

Both Blighted.

Taking apart a quadron of Empyrean—two mechanicals, two
evocati augusti
—like it’s nothing.

“Cael,” Arthur says, the word spoken in a quiet hush, somehow both pained and happy at once.

“Cael’s your son, right?” Pressman asks.

“What about him?” Kallen says.

Arthur squeezes his eyes shut. “On the visidex. That boy is my son. That boy is Cael, and that girl is his Obligated, Wanda Mecklin.”

Back at the skiff out back of Pressman’s house, Arthur stops, leans forward on his elbows, and presses his head against the cool metal of the ship. He breathes in and out, then finds a laugh crawling up out of him like a frog from its hibernation hole. A laugh that quickly morphs into a sob as the full weight of what he saw hits him.

Cael is alive.

Cael has the Blight.

Cael killed two Empyrean soldiers.

These last two pieces cannot diminish the first, but still they overwhelm. Guilt chews at Arthur like weevils stripping a corncob of its kernels. He never wanted Cael to have to grow up into this. Merelda, either. Both his children now plunged into a world like the one he grew up in—thrown into it too early, forced to grow up fast, made to do things that no adult should have to do much less any child. He thinks again of Lane running a city all on his own. Rigo having lost a foot. Wanda with the Blight, too. And what of Gwennie? Hell, even Boyland, or any of the other children in Boxelder. What happened to them? Were they turned into metal men, doing the bidding of the Empyrean?

Controllable workers. Docile to their handlers, violent to their foes.

Arthur draws a deep breath. He quiets his tears.

He has a shot still. Of helping his kids get to a normal life, or some semblance of it. It isn’t over for them. It’s over for him, maybe, mostly, but for them—life goes on. Many years ahead.

It’s up to him to make sure those years are good ones.

The father’s creed.

That means he has to get to Cael.
Now.
Cael is nearby. Or nearby enough. The visidex showed a stamp not too far from here. He’ll fly over, canvass the area. Though that probably means the Empyrean will be doing the same, but he has to take that chance. Cael needs him.

Their family can be reunited.

He opens the skiff door, gets in, starts to sit down—

A blow to the head knocks him sideways into the next seat.

His ear rings. He senses someone hovering over him; Arthur takes the case with the gun, Heavenkiller, and whips it upward even as his vision distorts and drifts into double, triple—

But the person deftly ducks out of the way, then catches the box and yanks it away. A voice reaches him. Female.

“The Empyrean requests your presence.”

He knows that voice. He swears he does.

Slowly, his vision drifts back together, like two leaves in a puddle drifting closer and closer—and it’s then he sees Simone Agrasanto standing there, hunched over inside the skiff, scowling. One eye hidden behind an eye patch, the rest of her face wearing the deep lines of a perpetually pissed-off person.

“You,” he says.

“Me,” she answers.

And then she hits him again.

CROSSING THE PERIMETER

AS
HE
WALKS
through the endless corn, Cael knows he should be scared. And sad. And ashamed. Two more men, dead by his hand—well, not his
hand
precisely, but at this point he believes that the Blight-vine coiled around his arm is still under his command.

And yet he feels invigorated. More alive than he’s felt in a long time. It’s not the taking of lives that did it—there he admits to a pang of guilt with a thread of horror twisted around it. But rather, it’s the power.

The things he was able to do. Cutting through his own cuffs. Launching corncobs like they were dang bottle rockets.

What else can he do?

Wanda is just as cranked about it as he is. She skips around him, giggling, and at one point she stops him in the corn and grabs his collar in her hands and she kisses him so hard it feels like she’s trying to eat him or be eaten herself—swallowed up whole so that the both of them can be together.

He pulls her into an embrace, and she whispers in his ear: “We can do anything, Cael. The Heartland is ours. Together.”

Her tongue finds his ear and a shiver moves over him.

This isn’t the Wanda I knew,
he thinks.

A distant, frightened thought. Strange, but then his body reacts, and he feels the heat rise to his cheeks. And once more he can feel all the little lights inside her (Blight-lights, he’s taken to calling them) twinkling like the parliament of stars that will soon be overhead as the sun sets and the moon rises. Her hand drifts to his stomach. His hand slides over the small of her back and she presses into him—

He feels it before he hears it.

The corn, disturbed. Aware in its own way—and that awareness shared with him. Thrust upon him.

Someone’s coming.

That’s when he hears the
snap
.

And the voice that follows.

“Thought I saw something out here.”

Cael pulls Wanda to the ground. He urges her against the earth and flattens himself there, too. In the sunlight that shines at a slant, pooling there like rainwater, he can see Wanda’s face—it’s bright, electric, alive, her eyes dancing, her mouth twisted in a strange smile.

Out there, a shape. Thirty feet away. Barely seen through the stalks.

A voice crackles over a radio: “If you don’t see anything, come back. Need help with the perimeter.”

The other voice, not on the radio: “Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah.”

And then the body retreats through the corn.

Once more, Cael and Wanda are left alone.

“We can take them,” she says.

“You’re awfully eager.”

“We have power they don’t understand.”

“They don’t need to understand it to get in a lucky shot. We’re still just two cornpone yokels to them. And they’re the Empyrean. Two of them out there now, but not sure how many others might be there.”

“So let’s go find out. And if they mess with us—”

He sucks air through his teeth: “Dang, you gotta relax for a minute. One of us can go. If we both go, that gives them a better chance of spotting us.”

Wanda smiles, changes the conversation suddenly. “The corn doesn’t touch us. Have you noticed that? It tries to bleed anyone else who goes through it, but us . . . it stays away.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I noticed.”

“We can use that. We can be quiet.”

“
One
of us can use that. I’ll go.”

“Are you going because you think I’m not capable?” Her chin is lifted up, and the smirk on her face suggests a challenge. That, too, is unusual for her. The Wanda he once knew was a leaf in a stream, going whatever way the water wanted. But now she seems to be planting herself in the current like a rock. He can’t help but admit: he kinda likes it.

“I’m going because one of us has to, and if someone’s gonna get hurt I’d rather it be me than you.”

She smiles sweetly. “My hero.”

“Heh. Yeah. All right. You good here?”

“How will you find me again in all this corn?”