The Last Hour of Gann (178 page)

“Are you sure that’s what you want to do?”

“Yes,” he said. “Truth, all the reasons I had for coming here were answered long before now. I know I could stay here if I asked and I know the Oracles will probably push for it, but I want to go home. I want to see my child born behind the walls where I was born. I want to see my wife lying in my bed. I want to see my brothers again, even if it means I have to fight them a few times first. I want to go
home
, Amber, and I want to stay home when I get there.”

She leaned against his side in sympathy, then startled and gave him a sharp, wondering stare.

He noticed and shrugged his spines. “If there is no God, it doesn’t matter. If there is, surely He would want me to call my wife by her beautiful name. Amber.” He pinched her chin and leaned in to nuzzle at her. “My Amber. Come home with me.”

She cupped his face and kissed him back. “You know I will.”

“Do I?”

“Meoraq, if there had been a starship waiting
there all fueled up and freshly-waxed just the way Scott wanted, I’d still be going home with you. Didn’t you know that by now?”

“Yes,” he said and nipped at her shoulder. “But I like to hear you say it.”

She stood up, hugging herself as she watched the sun sink over the mountains, setting the sky around it on fire. The first timekeepers began to ring the bells of tenth-hour and the rest quickly joined in. Kitchen smells began to ride the wisps of smoke leaking from the wind-ways. Somewhere on a neighboring section of the roof, music began to play: a celebration of life, a song of praise before God. “I really am sorry about your little knives,” Amber said.

“
Eh, you saved me, didn’t you? Besides—” He patted her braid on his arm. “—I still have this to wear. And I have your cup.”

“And your tea box.”

“Then life is good. Help me.”

She took his arm and together they managed to get him on his feet. He took a moment to adjust to his weight and the way the world wanted to pull at it and then
just looked at her.

“Life is good,” he said again, not without some weary surprise. “Isn’t it?”

She thought it over, her soft brow furrowed, frowning. “Yeah,” she said at last, and even huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah, I really think it is.”

H
e put out his hand. She took it and together, they left the roof. The sun slipped away, but the clouds kept burning, outlined in shocking shades of pink and blue. The clanging bells died and the music played on. The last hour of Gann ended, the hour of Uyane began, and in the east, the first star of evening came out.

THE END

September 2010 – September 2013

Also by
R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series
:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

Olivia

The Scholomance

Cottonwood

COMING SOON

Pool

Coming in 2014!

Pool

PROLOGUE

The Kuluzo Mountains in eastern Alaska have always been a dangerous place, but the low buckle of rock the white men called Mount Isaac was more dangerous, not because of the ice which cloaked its more impressive brothers in the Kuluzos, or the quakes that rocked so many of the mountains in that land, but because it was also a bad place. The Naiaksit Indians who made their homes in the dry forests at its feet called it “Chuatok”—the Hunger—and told tales of the restless and angry spirits who roamed there, of Wendigo whose wild song could make a man desire to feed on the flesh of other men, of the monstrous sons of Trickster who knew no welcome in heaven or on Earth. The whites came in their quest for gold, penetrating the wild places by the thousands in a mere handspan of years. They left a grave behind at the end of every day, but still they came and it was said of them by more than one mouth that no place was so haunted that the white men would not try to cut a pass through it or set a town atop it…but no pass was ever made across relatively small Mount Isaac, where no Indian guide of any tribe would go and no white scout ever returned. Chuatok hungered. Chuatok fed.

Nevertheless, in 1897, gold was found in that same Alaskan wilderness where Wendigo howled, and from that day, the white man inevitably came. Towns grew up fast even in dangerous places, around Mount Isaac at first, and finally, tentatively, atop it. Men vanished, but then, in such places when keeping only the untamed company of other impoverished and desperate fools, men will. Their lives were unremarkable. Their deaths were quiet.

Until Hodel in the summer of 1898.

The Hodel Mining Company boasted a great profit in that largely luckless year of the Klondike Rush, but then, the Hodel Mining Company did not dig for gold. Oh, they took it where they found it, and they did find it now and then, but the company’s interest lay in other minerals—“Industry minerals,” as the mine’s founder was so oft to say, with great emphasis and satisfaction on the first word—and, of course, in acquiring its discouraged and impoverished labor force as cheaply as possible. In the eight months since the mine’s opening, great quantities of lead and zinc had been pulled from the deep rock and shipped away down the rough road on the three-week trek to the railroad, as well as a few modest tons of silver and several crates of cinnabar (Hodel always accompanied those shipments himself, eschewing the luxury compartments aboard the train which he usually favored to sit, smoking and glowering, atop the crate containing the valuable ‘red mercury’). There were no Naiaksit left by then to warn them not to dig, and it is doubtful anyone would have listened if there had been. It takes terrible things to make a desperate man take warning, and Alaska in 1898 was filled with desperate men.

It began slowly, a mere trickle before the flood. Lone-wolf miners who had for years come in as regular as the rains to trade a tobacco-pouch of gold dust for a bath, a bottle, a box of bullets and one of Handsome Jack’s two-penny whores did not come in. The flint-eyed strangers suspected by many of claim-jumping and murder, vanished next, but no great loss. Some of the men working the Hodel Company’s mine came up muttering to each other about noises they could not have heard down in the deepest shafts, described by some as “that clicking, ear-picking sound that bats make right up close”, or “a heavy, slithery sound, with claws”, or just, “breathing, real quiet, allus coming from behind-like”. Hodel did his best to put a stop to that noise, but when Miss Molly Slipper, highest-paid whore in camp at ten cents a throw, took herself out the door on a drunk and never came back, men started to leave. Only one or two at first, the soft-handed sort no one was particularly surprised to see the back end of in this wilderness, but then it was Calico Pike, working the deep end of the unfinished Shaft Six, who took his pick and a handcart down the Number Nine tunnel, let out a bellow, a curse and then a scream, and was gone by the time the other men in the morning crew took the necessary ten running steps to round the tunnel’s sharp turn. There was a new hole in the back wall where he’d been cutting, a cold breeze that blew out of it, three dollar-sized drops of blood just below it, and a sound receding into the black—that clicking, scraping, heavily-breathing, impossible sound.

A lot of men left then, and one of them was Handsome Jack Hodel, son and scion of Richard Hodel, founder of the Hodel Mining Company and owner of the Hodel Mine, the Hodel General Store, the Hodel Claim Registry, and the Hodel Traveller’s Rest (who proudly advertised beds, baths, and spirits, but not the women that brought in most of their trade). He left after listening to his father rant at his foremen for three and one-half hours about how there was nothing in those tunnels, nothing dragging burly miners away, and nothing for God’s sake eating them and gnawing on their mother-loving bones, so take these Christing things out right now and bury them before some superstitious damned fool sees them! He left, and he took as much as he could fit into a set of saddlebags with him, including $4700 in bills, $2200 in silver, all the cinnabar he could pocket, and the deed to Hodel itself, which was not really stealing, since he was his father’s only son, so far as anyone knew, and a man had an obligation to look after his inheritance.

Richard Hodel, a man who had never been accused of an overabundance of fatherly feeling, would almost certainly have hunted down his son and heir (and strung him up from the nearest tree, after putting a few holes in his gullet and a few boots to his bones, like as not), but he never had the chance. Every man who had not crept quietly away from Hodel before sundown that night (well before Handsome Jack’s escape had been noticed) was dead before sunup the next day. The work of claim-jumpers, said some, seeing overturned chairs, bloodsign, and the pitably light scores of human fingernails scratching across the hotel’s wooden floors. Bears, said others, because for all of that, there were no bodies to be found and buried. The Indians said nothing at all, but thought, perhaps, of restless spirits, Wendigo, and Trickster’s half-born abominations.

Either way, it was over and done, and so after the investigation (and the emptying of the mineral shed where everything Handsome Jack had not taken lay untouched by the murderous, claim-jumping bears of Alaska), all shafts leading into the mines were boarded over (the cage shafts, anyway, and whatever vent shafts the investigators stumbled across in their investigations), and Hodel was abandoned until the company decided what it wanted to do with the land. There was not much room for mystery as long as there was still gold in the mountains, but there was no gold on Mount Isaac and so the men were content to bury the truth of the Disaster with the mine and move on.

The Disaster had nothing to do with bears or monsters. In truth, it could not be said to have much to do with men either, as men reckon themselves.

But they were men once. Not a hundred years ago, or even a thousand, but at the very roots of mankind’s emergence. They were men when men lived in caves, made fire with stones, and still lived in fear of the world they would one day subjugate and master. They were men then, but the men came out of the caves. These went deeper inside. Both changed. And in 1898, when they met again, Hodel’s mining camp vanished. But it could be said that the people of Hodel remained, the new people, content to stay in their new home once the threat of other, of not-same, had been overcome and peace returned to their simple lives.

For they were peaceful, really. Not in the same way as humans now reckon peace, no more than they could be reckoned men, but in their own way, and it was peaceful enough. Men disappeared on the mountain from time to time—men who had no business being up there in the first place, men who were not much mourned or long missed—but there were no more Hodel Disasters. Gradually, some very ordinary murders and vanishings took its place. The gold gave out in the mountains. The mining companies collapsed and the towns built on their names were forgotten. If Handsome Jack had waited another hour and fifteen minutes before sneaking away on his father’s horse, or if he’d just left the deed behind and stolen one more bag of silver instead, Hodel might have been just another ghost town haunting the high unknown wilds of the Cascades, and things would have been different. Or if Jack had not been quite so quick to settle down with the first rich widow taken in by his good looks and frontier charm, or if a thousand things, culminating in if the wooden barrier capping the old Number Two pipe-shaft had never collapsed.

It had been a hundred and twenty years, almost to the very day, but the high, dry climate of the eastern face of Mount Isaac had preserved much. Quite a lot of debris had fallen in over that cap over the years, and countless animals had crossed over it without worry, but upon that unremembered anniversary, whatever restless and angry spirits dwelled in that hungry place surely guided the feet of William White, who had hunted the dry forest and panned its streams some fifty-odd years and who feared no man and no rotten timber. With one dry, dusty snap, Big Bill dropped one hundred six feet past rusted pulleys and mummified fibers of rope that had once hauled lead by the cage-load from the same mountain where he panned for gold. He actually landed pretty well, which was paradoxically unfortunate. He shattered his rifle, as well as most of the bones in the lower half of his body and lay alternately screaming for help and laughing at his own stupidity, watching his horrifically non-lethal wounds worsen and drinking what he had left of his day’s allotment of homebrew until the shock wore off. The rain that kept him chilled and helped his broken limbs to rot away kept him alive ten agonizing days more, and then he died. Forty days after that, give or take, a descendant of the creatures who had broken into the Hodel Company Mine from deeper parts unknown (a descendant, in fact, of the very one who had pulled Calico Pike to his unpleasant doom) followed the smell to this newly-opened portal and squinted up into the wet sky.