The Stars Askew (20 page)

Armand remained silent. Here he sat, next to the embodiment of everything he loathed. “If you were in Caeli-Amur, you'd be called a seditionist.”

“I often thought of traveling to Caeli-Amur, but my home is Varenis. What can you do?”

“You seem to accept your fate,” said Armand.

“We're but little particles on the river of history. We don't choose what happens to us, only how we respond. Why should I rage or cry against history? No—we must take her as she is.”

“On the contrary, we have to
make
history. We'll have to escape the mines quickly. I don't think anyone lives for long.” Already Armand was envisioning a plan. When he returned to Varenis, he would find Rainer, ally himself with the belligerents, and wreak revenge on Valentin. Yes—Valentin would learn that loyalty was a principle worth cultivating after all. Armand did not believe a word of Valentin's story about his grandfather. Valentin was a liar, and he would pay for that. All Armand needed was some leverage to make up for the missing prism.

The man pursed his lips and spoke happily. “And after escape, we'll have a nice coffee at a place I know in the Kinarian Pocket. They do a fine lemon tart there too.”

Armand smiled at the incongruous thought. “What's your name?”

“Irik,” the man said. He didn't ask Armand's name.

“I'm Armand.”

For seemingly no reason, the train would occasionally grind to a halt. Hours later it would shudder back into motion. Outside it began to rain, and the prisoners tried to push their tongues through the cracks in the walls to absorb some of the moisture. But it was thankless work.

Eventually the light softened and night descended. The rain fell heavier here on the western side of the Etolian range.

Armand's mouth felt as though it was filled with dust, and he found himself looking around, as if water might be hidden in the carriage somewhere. He, too, pushed his tongue though the spaces between carriage walls, but he found that all he could taste was the earthy wood, which seemed to dry his tongue out even more. When he sat down, his stomach ached. He had never felt such a thirst before, and his inability to quench it became a private hell. His cold eyes roved over the other prisoners with cold indifference. They began to resemble nothing but bundles of rags.

The cold settled, and the prisoners huddled together like animals. There was no conversation in the dark; there was nothing to be said. Armand pressed himself into one side of the group. He felt warm and rancid breath on his cheek, heat emanating from the pile of bodies. On the other side, the cold fell on him like icy dew.

Only the injured man lay alone, sprawled now on the floor. His moans grew weaker and weaker until they stopped altogether. His silence passed unnoticed as the black night wore on interminably. Bodies shifted and moved. There were groans and sighs. In the morning, the injured man's corpse lay stinking and cold. No one dared touch it, and they all stayed as far away from it as possible.

Armand's bitterness fell away from him in that terrible train, and he laughed at his plan to return to Varenis. In that darkness, he felt stripped of all hopes, all dreams, all ambitions. From now on, his only goal would be to survive.

*   *   *

Around midday of the second day, Armand spied a rough town through the cracks of the carriage. Dirty and dispossessed barbarians begged on the streets, piles of logs lay stacked by the side of the train, the streets were thick with mud. They swept through the place quickly. Later that day Armand became vaguely aware of the light in the carriage shifting, as the train slowly turned in a new direction. The air became cool and moist as they climbed into the forested mountains.

Finally the train shuddered to a halt. Armand dragged himself to his feet and peered through the cracks. Guards dressed in black leather loitered aimlessly between this prison train and a second one on a track nearby. Some leaned on long pikes, muttering a few inaudible words to one another; others stared dully into the distance, unimpressed by the new arrivals.

One guard dressed in a long leather coat looked strangely like a schoolmaster, a stubby nose hidden in his soft round face. He pointed toward the front of the train and called out to someone, “As usual. As usual.” As the guard gestured, Armand pressed his exhausted eyes together, opened them again, but the sight remained: the man's left eye was red, as if a blood vessel had burst and now filled it with blood. Bright spidery veins ran away from the edge of his eye. As he turned and marched away, a shot of fear ran through Armand.

Other prisoners pressed against the carriage walls, feeling a mixture of fear and desperation. They could hear the doors of the carriage in front of them sliding open. Before long the guards directed disoriented prisoners forward. An old woman stumbled and fell, struggled to her feet again without help, and continued with the rest of them. A child of about six had lost his parents and stood crying as the streams of prisoners moved around him.

“The grinding wheels of history, eh?” Irik peered through the cracks beside Armand.

“Where are they all from?” said Armand.

“Same as in this carriage: criminals, economic prisoners, rebels from the colonies—and one oppositionist.” Irik's eyes lit up with irony. “Maybe it's that skinny one over there, the one looking for his spectacles in the mud.”

A large metal latch clunked, and their door rolled open with a boom.

“Out.” One of the guards pointed toward the front of the train, but they didn't need encouragement now. Desperate need to escape the corpse forced them out; hope of water drove them on.

A misty rain drifted down onto them. As he stumbled along with the others, Armand looked up at the craggy ranges that rose up around them. Here and there clumps of gray and green bushes and vines clung to the steep slopes. Elsewhere, carpets of lichen looked soft and inviting. In some places the earth had been sheered away from flat faces of rock, leaving only the bones of the mountains. The peaks were hidden by low clouds that reached down with long watery tendrils toward them. He had been right: they had been brought to the mines on the western side of the Etolian range. Somewhere ahead of them lay the mountaintop retreats of the Augurers. Even farther, as the mountains slowly became foothills on the far side of the range, was Caeli-Amur.

“Water, water,” begged some of the prisoners.

The guards simply pushed them along. “Down to the end of the line.”

Some of the prisoners fell to their knees, greedily lapping at a large puddle lying by the train.

Armand rushed forward, but a strong arm grasped him. Irik spoke with certainty. “Those pools are stagnant. There will be water later.”

A group of guards kicked the drinking prisoners. “Get up!”

Several staggered to their feet and wandered on, but others remained crouched over the pools. One of the guards plunged the tip of his pike into the side of a kneeling woman. She groaned horribly, dropped a hand into the pool. The others scuttled away, leaving her crying and holding her side.

“Get up,” the guard kicked her.

The woman moaned as she tried to get to her feet. The guard kicked at her again, and she splashed onto her side into the pool. A moment later the pike plunged into her stomach. “Get up!” Her head thrown back, she held on to its blade.

Irik pushed Armand along with the rest of the prisoners, leaving the woman to die alone. The image was seared into Armand's mind. The prisoners came to a wide and empty space at the front of the trains. Surrounded by guards, they milled around uncertainly. The tracks led off to one side, curling their way along the valley, past a walled camp, and toward what appeared to be a distant factory. On the far side of the field were three large buildings, like storage sheds with vast open doorways. A fast-flowing river cut through the center of the valley, where copses of pine and silver birch grew. Fed by water from the mountains, the river apparently flowed down to the great forests and plains to the north and west, where barbarian tribes still thrived. That would be the way to escape.

A high voice startled Armand. On a platform to one side of the field stood the round-faced guard with the bloodred eye and the long black coat. He had now placed small pince-nez on his nose, even though he looked over them to address the prisoners. His high and reedy voice rang shrilly over the field as his eyes roved over the pathetic crowd. There seemed to be a faint and luminous redness around him, an unnatural halo.

“Welcome to Camp X, the pride of Varenis's work camps. I am Commander Raken. Here I will be your leader, your teacher. Together we will mine bloodstone for the Empire's thaumaturgists. You will learn to embrace the freedom offered to you by work. All those fears and worries your old life brought will be eradicated. You will come to enjoy life here, stripped of all the useless concerns that once cluttered it. You will discover a new meaning in serving the greater good. So, prepare yourself for your new life, and you may find peace in this place. Resist, and you will surely be broken. Women to the shed on the right. All the men into the shed on the left. No exceptions for children.” As he pointed, Armand noticed red spidery veins running along his arm.

Armand followed Irik to join the men, ignoring the wailing of women who struggled to hold on to their boys, the cries of men holding on to daughters.

In the great shed they began a process that stripped them of their identities. Ahead of Armand, prisoners surrendered all their possessions to gray-overalled men, prisoners themselves. Some resisted and were beaten; most acquiesced silently. Instinctively, Armand took his grandfather's ring from his finger and slipped it into his dry mouth. He tried desperately to salivate as he watched those ahead open their mouths for inspection. With a frenzied effort, he gagged, got the thing down. A moment later he was stripped, his mouth checked for hidden treasures, and then he was clothed in the same gray overalls and functional boots as the others.

“Your number is printed on the front of your overalls. This is how you will be known,” the supervisor said as he pointed toward his own number—7624—sewn onto his overalls, over his heart. He grinned, revealing black and rotten teeth. The top left section of his forehead had a long indentation, as if years before he had been struck by a pole, caving in his skull. The veins on 7624's forehead glowed an uncanny red; the light they threw out seemed to contain its own shadow within itself. Chills ran through Armand, for he knew the sign of thaumaturgical sickness.

Several others showed the same odd changes: spidery red veins climbing over their limbs, up their necks, or over their faces. One of the new prisoners, an old man with a shock of white hair, stepped toward number 7624 and spoke politely: “Please, we're all terribly thirsty. Would it be possible for us to have something to drink?”

Number 7624 smiled ironically. “Oh, they'll be water enough. Soon you'll wish there was no water at all.”

Armand sat on a bench, waiting for other overall-wearing prisoners who were shaving the new prisoners' heads with shears. Armand kept still as his hair came off, then staggered forward toward the end of the shed, its door open to a cold wind.

“You look like a bird, number 2591.” Irik stopped beside Armand. “Looks like you're on your way to happiness.”

With a grim smile, Armand glanced at Irik. The laughing eyes, the sculpted high cheekbones, the finely shaped forehead—the man was quite handsome.

They followed the line of prisoners, led now by guards, along a winding road. As they walked, they passed strange melted red statues that threw off the same weird light. Bodies were barely discernible beneath the melted forms: arms and legs; tilted heads; mouths open in wonder or terror, or perhaps both; eyes staring wide.

“We must escape this place,” Armand said.

Irik laughed softly. “You think so?”

Constructed from wooden uprights and wire mesh, the high walls of a camp rose up before them. Guards stood on high towers behind huge bowless, pressure-powered ballistae fixed to rotating stands. Past the camp, a factory pumped out smoke from some furnace. There, prisoners loaded a train with metal barrels containing bloodstone.

The newcomers shuffled underneath the camp's sturdy gate, where they broke into a run toward a row of water pumps lining one wall. Armand found himself struggling against the rushing bodies, pushing them aside. As one prisoner pumped the water, others cupped their hands, drinking frantically. Someone jostled Armand. He shoved back and saw an old man with his shock of white hair fall down. But Armand didn't care: he needed water. He held his hands beneath the pump. The water tasted cool and sweet, better than any drink he had ever tasted. He could not drink enough of it.

Again and again he cupped his hands until he was bloated and thought he might vomit.

Finally he stepped back to see Irik looking on calmly. The man's self-control was enviable. Perhaps it had been steeled through long years of deprivation as an oppositionist in Varenis. When Irik was finally able to approach the water pumps, he did so without rushing. This was the man who Armand needed to ally himself with if he were to survive.

Eventually one of the black-clad guards stood before them and pointed to a row of low-lying buildings across a central square. “Your bunks are numbered. Today you rest—you are lucky. Tomorrow you will begin work. Then you'll know the meaning of life in Camp X, and you will curse the day you betrayed Varenis.”

*   *   *

When the bell rang in the evening, Armand dragged himself from his tiny cot and stepped out into the drab yard. He surveyed the camp, which was composed of primitive wooden buildings circling the central square: four long sleeping halls, a row of outhouses, an infirmary and mess hall (which were the largest and best constructed of the buildings), a small carpentry shop and mechanics shop. There was no beauty here, just brutal functionality. Cracks gaped between the buildings' timber beams, which the weather had stripped of most of their paint.