Tribe: The Red Hand (Tribe Series Book 1) (6 page)

Around midday, they came to an area where a long ago wildfire had cleared out the forest, providing a view of a wide valley, and beyond that, the scrubby foothills marched off to the east until they joined a dusty, summer-yellow plain.

The valley below them held another of the desolate cities that had not seen human inhabitants since the Red Fever crushed the world.

From their vantage point the leaning, cone-shaped buildings of the city resembled tired old men gathered around their own graves. Sadness touched her heart, but she promptly buried it before Aiden could see her feelings written across her face.

“What are we doing here?” Kestrel asked.

Aiden gave her a strange look. What she saw in his raised eyebrows, too-wide eyes, and slightly parted lips, was a startled uncertainty. She would not have been more surprised if he had fallen over dead at her feet. He spoke quietly, as if imparting a secret. “Have you ever wanted to explore the old cities?”

“No,” Kestrel said, aghast. “Everyone knows they are cursed with poisoned luck and dark spirits. More than that, the Elders have forbidden us to enter them. Who in their right mind would want to explore…?”

She trailed off, suddenly understanding his earlier expression. To Aiden, rules were not meant to be broken, and he viewed anyone who so much as bent the rules to be weak and unworthy. And yet, here he was, unable to resist the allure of breaking one such rule.

Maybe the fever was influencing her, but all at once she felt closer to him than she ever had before. For the first time, she saw him as a real person, instead of a piece of walking iron. Seeing him that way, not necessarily fragile, but vulnerable, gave her an idea that never would have crossed her mind before—she had meant every word about the dangers that lurked in the old cities.

“I’ll go with you,” she said slowly, hoping she was not condemning herself to some gruesome end, “but only if you stop saying I’m not worthy to be a Red Hand.”

His brow furrowed in thought. Whatever was going on inside his head seemed disagreeable, but after a few seconds he nodded. “All right, I agree.”

His assurance did not sound very convincing, but she decided to take what she could get. “Let’s go.”

He studied her for a few moments, as if suspecting some trick, then began walking toward the city.

Kestrel went after him, but the closer they came to the outskirts, the less certain she was of the bargain she had made. Thinking again of how he always managed to come out ahead, she could not help but wonder if he had planned this all along.

CHAPTER TEN

Shaped like a huge teardrop, the narrowest point of the ancient city began high up the valley and swelled as it fell into the lower end a few miles away. Gray ribbons, edged with pale lines that magnified the sunlight, formed a gridwork throughout the city. Kestrel knew they were not ribbons at all, but ancient roadways that remained untouched by countless deep snowfalls and spring thaws.

Most such thoroughfares did not extend past the old cities, but when hunting two summers ago, Kestrel had ventured far south of her village. After climbing a high plateau, she had found a similar grid nestled amongst the sage flats. To her, it looked as if someone had thought to build a city on that spot, but had only managed to build the roads.

She had approached the outermost road with superstitious dread. After spending several minutes looking down at the roadway, she talked herself into to touching it, hesitantly at first, like a cat testing water with its paw, then pressing her palm flat against the surface. It had felt like glass, maybe polished stone, but slightly gritty. It had also been cool, despite the heat of the day. When she later told One-Ear Tom about her find, he warned her to stay away. And so she had … until last winter.

Telling herself that she was only hunting antelope, she returned to the plateau, its smooth crown swept by icy winds and covered in a few inches of snow—except where the roads lay. They were bare, and when she put her hand on one that time, it had been warm and dry. Suspecting some enchantment at work, she had fled.

Now Kestrel and Aiden followed a similar road into the old city. She tried not to think about the coolness of it beneath her feet, despite the beating sun.

They made their way deeper into what had once been home to innumerable people, those who had last walked in the flesh before the Red Fever had, according to One-Ear Tom’s more grisly stories, devoured their insides and left them spewing blood in their final moments. What drying bones there might have once been to mark their passing, had long since been dragged away by scavenging animals, or reduced to dust by countless long years.

“I don’t like it here,” Kestrel said, helpless to avoid speaking aloud her fears. Her eyes traced the evidence of the last wildfire that had swept through the area, probably back before her parents had begun their courtship. Besides old dead tree stumps hidden amongst the new growth, she saw where fingers of flame had shattered windows, and left behind sooty slashes up the sides of almost every nearby building. Rusted corpses of bizarre machines slumped along the roadsides, the wonders they had performed forgotten, and now serving no greater purpose than to provide shelter for rodents. It was hard to believe this city had ever been filled with light and life.

“There’s nothing to fear,” Aiden said, running his hand over the rusted hulk of a machine that, if the stories were true, might have once soared through the air, or raced at great speed over the land. Kestrel was never sure if those tales were reliable, because some even claimed that people had once traveled between the stars.

“I can feel them watching,” Kestrel said softly, recalling a recurring nightmare she used to have. In it, shapeless
things
ripped loose from the muddy ground after a rainstorm—much like the one the night before—and hounded her though a phantom forest cloaked in shadow and mist. No matter how far or fast she ran, those rotting things always caught her. What she remembered clearest about the dream was the way the malignant creatures would ogle her with dead white eyes as they snaked their dead fingers around her throat. Before she woke, their gaping mouths, puffing the reek of things lying putrid in the sun, would fall on her and begin to feed. The memory of their sightless stares and loathsome touch felt much the same as she did now: trapped and afraid.

Aiden favored her with a puzzled look. “Who can you feel?”

“The
dead
. They are everywhere … watching … waiting.”

Aiden paused. “You mean the
Ancestors?
”

“Who else?”

“They will not trouble us.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” Aiden said, “no matter what anyone says, they were just people—like me and you.” He spoke as if he had some secret knowledge.

“Maybe they
were
people,” Kestrel allowed, “but now they’re dead.”

“Dead or alive, they will not trouble us.”

Kestrel was not so sure. “You know what One-Ear Tom says?”

“Remind me,” Aiden answered in a bored tone.

“‘The dead want only one thing from the living, and that’s to make them dead, too.’”

“If the Ancestors wanted to harm us, then why do we waste our time asking favors of them?”

Kestrel frowned at the raw slash on her palm, from which her blood sacrifice had run. Like it or not, Aiden had a point. If she had trusted the Ancestors enough to give such an offering, in return for ensuring that the lion continued pursuing her, how could she fear them?

“I still don’t like being here.”

“We won’t be for long,” Aiden said, leading her to a enormous, circular green. Cracked brickwork paved its edge, and the overgrown grassy center was dotted with stone benches resting under old, hoary trees. A quick glance told her the green was easily twice as large as her village. It seemed that everything about the old world had been huge.

At the center of the green stood a tall metal statue of a stern-faced man looking east. Webs of greenish corrosion covered every inch of him, along with generous splatters of bird droppings on his shoulders and head. A few of the offending birds in question, half a dozen pigeons, cooed and shifted on his shoulders. They were cautious of the two intruders, but not overly frightened. Kestrel wondered if they had seen people here before. If so, who? Brow knotting, she cast a suspicious eye on her brother.

“You’ve come here before, haven’t you?”

He started, as if he had not expected her to guess his secret. His face smoothed, and he stopped under a weeping willow, it hanging bows brushing one of the stone benches. “Several times. Now, until I get back, stay here.”

“Where are you going?” Kestrel demanded, failing to hide her unease that he was planning to leave her.

“Don’t worry, little sister. You’ll be safe … unless any bears are about to catch the scent of that bloody bundle you’re carrying.”

Kestrel hugged her prize a little closer. It was beginning to smell ripe. “I’m not afraid of bears.”

Aiden flashed a smile that was only about half as scornful as usual. “Then sit down and rest. I’ll be back soon.”

“You still haven’t told me where you’re going.”

“You’ll know soon enough,” he said, dropping his knapsack on the ground near the bench. With that, he trotted away.

She watched him until he vanished into a patch of thick bracken and ferns growing between a pair of broken gray buildings on the far side of the green.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kestrel drained most of her waterskin before taking a seat on the bench, its stone edges softened by time. It was surprisingly comfortable. So comfortable that she could not resist stretching out and looking up at the sky. The longer she rested there, the farther away her fears soared, and she was able to close her eyes and doze.

She came awake after what felt like just a few minutes, and saw that Aiden had returned. He was stuffing something into his knapsack. She had never seen such a device, but for some reason it sparked a faint memory.

Kestrel sat up and, for a moment, the world spun around her. “What is that?” she asked after the spinning ceased, and armed her sweat-slicked brow. The fever had come back stronger, and she was thirstier than ever. That worried her, because sometimes the worst sicknesses came in waves, each wave stronger than the last. Home was a long way away, and to feel this miserable made that journey seem insurmountable.

Aiden drew what he was holding back out of the pack. “It’s a weapon,” he said in a reverent hush.

Kestrel croaked a laugh. She knew weapons—bows and spears, axes and knives—but what he held looked like nothing more than a piece of old junk, something that even Fat Will, the village blacksmith, would deem useless.

Aiden scowled. “It
is
a weapon,” he insisted, holding it up. It was made of black metal with worn areas along prominent edges that gleamed dull gray. The curved grip seemed built to fit into the palm, just as he was holding it, and the other end, a tapered cylinder with long ridges running along its length, all glowing with a sickly green light, stretched a foot or more from his hand.

As Kestrel studied it, she realized why it was so familiar. “It’s a….” she searched for the word she had once heard, “….a
pistol
.” There was something more she was missing, something she had found frightening as a little girl when listening to tales around the village green, but she could not remember.

“Yes!” Aiden said, jumping to his feet. She had never seen him let his guard down enough to show so much excitement. “A
firelance
pistol. Watch this,” he said, bowing his head over the weapon with a disconcerting familiarity. He flipped a small lever on the side, pointed it at the statue, and slowly squeezed another lever on the underside of the firelance.

Not a lever
, Kestrel thought, as a powerful image filled her mind of One-Ear Tom’s grizzled face washed in firelight as he declared in somber tones,
The hounds of war squeezed the triggers of their firelances
,
and brought forth the thunders of Hell from their barrels.…

Eyes widening in alarm, Kestrel looked back to her brother, saw his grimace of anticipation as his finger tightened on the
trigger
. She recoiled in preparation of some roaring—

The weapon made an insignificant clicking noise.

Kestrel let out a shuddering breath. The sweat on her brow now had nothing to do with fever.

Aiden lowered the weapon, a scowl knotting his features. “What’s wrong with this thing?”

He fiddled with the lever on the side again, and then Kestrel heard a mosquito-like whine. Smiling now, Aiden lifted the firelance once more. This time when he pulled the trigger, the weapon bucked in his hand, and a whooshing pulse of something—to Kestrel it looked like a fist-sized ball of shimmering air—erupted from the end of the barrel, streaked across the park, and slammed against the head of the statue with a small cracking noise that sent the pigeons winging into the sky, seemingly unhurt.

Impressive
, she considered,
but hardly the thunders of Hell.
For a weapon that was supposedly so deadly, it seemed rather harmless.