BROWSER SPLIT HIS forces into four parties and sent each in a different direction to scout Corner Canyon Town. If everything went according to plan, they would all be in the same general area by moonrise. In the absolute worst case, should anyone be discovered and unable to flee, others could cover their retreat.
He took one last look around the huge Kettle Town plaza. The faded images of the katsinas that had once painted the front of the town had cracked and flaked off. He could discern patches of huge eyes, black beaks, and fanged muzzles, but little else.
“This must have been a remarkable place one hundred sun cycles ago,” Clay Frog remarked as she followed Browser’s gaze. She wore a gray knee-length war shirt.
“Yes,” he replied softly. “It must have been.”
“Do you think we’ll ever build anything like it again?”
Browser shook his head uncertainly and, from behind him, he heard Catkin respond, “How can we? When we killed the First People, we killed their knowledge.
Do you know a mason today who can construct a five-story building? I don’t.”
Sadness filled Browser. The glory was draining out of his people, like water down one of the washes. To stand here, before Kettle Town, and imagine it as it had been, was to feel a hole open in his heart. His people had once raised stunning towns like this, now they spent their time running in fear, desperately searching for their next meal, and thinking up ways to kill each other.
Were the old gods so bad, Browser? Is Two Hearts right when he says our troubles were brought by the katsinas?
He trotted away from Kettle Town and onto the broad thoroughfare that had long ago linked Kettle Town and Talon Town to the smaller towns across Straight Path Wash. Now rainwashed and windswept, the road was yet another reminder of his ancestors’ greatness.
He could feel Catkin’s eyes boring into his back. She had been looking at him strangely, and he knew she must have seen Obsidian enter his chamber.
He would tell her. But not now.
He didn’t know what to think about Obsidian’s offer. When he’d looked into Obsidian’s eyes, he’d seen desperation. He had never had a beautiful woman throw herself on his mercy that way—and he was certain she had an ulterior motive. Was she working with Two Hearts? Trying to get him to abandon the Katsinas’ People? Or did she truly wish to marry him?
You have time. Before you decide anything, you must kill Two Hearts
.
He led the way down into the wash. The inky darkness made the descent tricky, and he had to feel for each foothold.
At the bottom, he reached out and took Catkin’s hand, guiding her. She tightened her grip in his, and
for the moment he maintained the contact, leading her across the gravel bottom of the wash.
He had to release her in order to climb up the other side, and there, stepping up onto the canyon floor again, she resumed her position behind him.
He knew this road; he’d taken it many times when the Katsinas’ People had lived in Straight Path Canyon. It led to the great kiva in Corner Canyon. Had anyone used the kiva since the Katsinas’ People had held their last ceremonies there? Or had the huge subterranean ceremonial center been left to the pack rats, mice, and bats?
Fearing ambush, Browser left the rutted road and followed a meandering route that wound through tawny patches of grass. When they had lived in Hillside village, an extended family had eked out an existence in Pottery House. Browser remembered one of the little girls, a whip-thin urchin with a curious brown discoloration on her face.
Catkin made a faint click with her tongue, and Browser immediately sank to his haunches, listening to the darkness, sniffing the air. True to their training, the Bow warriors dropped and did the same. The faint hint of smoke rode the cold breeze that drifted down the canyon. Perhaps someone still lived in Pottery House?
Browser reached back, tapped her knee twice to indicate an advance, and rose. He could feel Catkin walking close behind him; the Bow Society warriors followed.
Browser circled downwind of Pottery House, approaching slowly. It wouldn’t do for them to be discovered by either turkeys or dogs. But only the musty scent of decay came to his nostrils. Humans left traces of boiling food, of cloth and baking corn, and of course their excrement, on the wind.
He eased up to the western side of the house and placed an ear to the stone, but heard nothing. He moved slowly along the wall. Midway down the room block,
a weathered pole ladder sagged against the wall. Browser bent down and touched the soil at the base of the ladder. Bristly weeds met his fingers, not packed earth from the passage of moccasins or sandals.
Catkin tapped his shoulder and pointed up the ladder. He nodded, and she started up.
He and the Fire Dogs waited in silence. He might have passed fifty breaths before Catkin’s body darkened the top of the ladder, and she carefully descended.
“Gone,” she whispered. “They’re long gone. Each of the roof entrances is open. It’s blacker than the First World inside. Nothing to smell but mold.”
“Then let’s move on. Spindle Whorl House is a bow shot to the south.”
At Spindle Whorl, the results were the same. The seven irregular rooms, and the solitary kiva on the east side of the structure, had been abandoned for at least a sun cycle. The place lay in disrepair.
Browser led his team past the villages that clustered around the great kiva. Talking Stitch Town stood silent and ghostly in the slanted glow of the rising moon. No evidence of violence could be seen, but two corpses sat outside the northern kiva. They had been there so long that only white bones, many scattered about, were left.
“So many left unburied,” Browser whispered as he looked down on the nameless dead.
“It is the times,” Catkin answered.
“Let it not be so for us,” Clay Frog added. “Death does not frighten me. But being left alone, to wander forever in search of one’s ancestors, that is frightening.”
Browser toed one of the gleaming bones from the path and led the way to War Club village, a bow shot to the east.
They ran in silence until they saw it. Long and hooked at one end, it was a sprawling place.
A sun cycle ago, six families had lived in War Club
village. True, they hadn’t kept the place like it had been in the First People’s days, but it had been a community. The people had grown enough to feed their families and to trade for trinkets.
They scuttled into the shadows of the northern wall and looked for a ladder. When they couldn’t find one, Catkin and Red Dog boosted Browser to the roof. He had made two steps when he came upon a ladder that had been pulled up and stowed on the roof. He glanced back at the new moon; its white light silhouetted him. Taking a chance, he placed each foot with care, pausing by one smokehole after another and sniffing.
At the third, he caught the dissipated odor of a warming fire, and could hear the faint burr of a sleeping man inside.
Browser crouched and searched the rooftops for the humped shape of a sentry huddled under a blanket. For thirty heartbeats he waited, seeing nothing. Two Hearts was their leader; he would be heavily guarded. Browser checked the other rooms, but found no one else.
He lowered himself over the wall and dropped lightly to the ground.
“One room occupied,” he whispered after leading them into the shadows. “I could hear someone sleeping, smell his fire. But he was alone.”
“A traveler,” Catkin guessed. “Someone passing through. We’ve checked, the weeds have grown up here, too. The lower kivas haven’t been used recently.”
“I agree. There was no sentry posted.” He leaned back against the wall and studied the moonlit canyon rim.
“There’s been no sign of movement.” Catkin exhaled and her breath rose in the pale light. “Are you sure he’s not up there at High Sun? That’s where the White Moccasins are.”
Browser frowned, aware of the way Clay Frog and Red Dog watched him. They really expected him to know where Two Hearts was hiding, as though he were
some sort of oracle. “He might be there,” Browser agreed. “But that’s for tomorrow night. I want to be sure that we’re not missing something here.” He pointed at the staircase, a dark slit in the rock where it hid in the shadows. “It wouldn’t do to be caught halfway from the top with warriors above you and more below.”
“I agree,” Red Dog said with his heavily accented voice. “Like Clay Frog, I want to lose my soul at home, where it can be cared for. Not here, where so many enemy ghosts prowl.”
“Let’s all stay alive.” Catkin playfully tapped his shoulder with her war club. “You have my promise that I will guard your back.”
“And I will guard yours,” Red Dog responded and grinned.
Catkin had always had a way with the other warriors; they instinctively liked and respected her, whereas he had to earn every warrior’s confidence.
“Let’s check Scorpion village next.” Browser pointed to the blocky buildings four bow shots to the southwest. They gleamed in the moonlight, standing near a pillar of rimrock that had defied the ages.
“Keep low,” Catkin reminded. “Move slowly. We don’t know how many scouts they have up on the rim.”
Browser’s leg muscles tensed as he skirted the talus that had tumbled from the rim. The boulders helped to screen them from above.
He knew Scorpion village well. He and the Katsinas’ People had lived there before moving across the canyon to repair and reconsecrate the great kiva at Talon Town. When they had lived there, the village consisted of fourteen rooms and five kivas. While the Katsinas’ People hadn’t built onto the place, they had replastered it and fixed the leaky roofs.
Browser scrambled the last distance into the shadow of the west wall. A small drainage that ran from the rimrock to the southwest cut down close to the town.
In his day, it had watered the corn, bean, and squash fields. From the looks of the place, no one had planted the fields since.
Browser took the ladder to the roof, moving cautiously as he crossed the second story. He paused, listening as he reached his old room. Here he had lived with Ash Girl and his son, Grass Moon. A spear of pain made him catch his breath. He closed his eyes, remembering his sick son. How was he to know that bubbling laughter would soon give way to frothy blood, that the flesh would melt from those strong bones and leave nothing but a weak shell?
Praise the gods that we cannot see too far into the future
. How would he have borne the knowledge that his little boy would soon be dead? That his wife would betray him for her witch father, and that he would kill her to save Catkin’s life?
An owl hooted, high above, to the west. Browser looked up at the rimrock. He could see the bird against the dark sky, its feathers outlined by the ghostly thin light of the moon. On silent wings it flew to the top of the small ridgetop house, screeched, then soared away like a black arrow, heading toward the Corner Canyon kiva.
Browser felt as if an invisible hand had just reached through his chest and stroked his heart.
Yes. There. That’s where Springbank had lived. Up on the gray shale ridge in a five-room building, attached to a single kiva. He had insisted on living separately, saying he needed time alone to communicate with the katsinas.
Browser stepped around and stared up at the square-roofed building. Owl House, Springbank had called it, in what most people thought was jest.
Was that Two Hearts’s evil lair? Is that where he’d lain with Ash Girl, heedless of the fact that she was his daughter as well as Browser’s wife? Is that where
he’d broken her so thoroughly that a monster soul had slipped inside her?
“Browser?”
He jumped at the hand that settled on his shoulder, and instinctively swung his war club up, ready to strike.
“Sorry,” Catkin whispered. “You were taking too long. We’ve checked the rest of the town. No one is here tonight, but people camp here with some regularity.”
He took a breath, stilling his frantic heart. “Yes,” he answered. “I was just …”
“Lost in the past,” she answered, knowing him too well.
He pointed with his war club. “Did you hear the owl screech? It went to perch up there.”
“I heard no owl.”
He felt cold, as though a mantle of snow had settled on his shoulders. The chase was coming to its conclusion. His gaze lifted to the rimrock.
“Two Hearts is here, somewhere, Catkin. I know he is.”
DUSTY USED THE jack to lower the old Holiday Rambler camp trailer onto the hitch of Dale’s Dodge. He’d always think of it that way: Dale’s Dodge, the truck he’d finally splurged to buy after years and nearly three hundred thousand miles in the old IH Scout. Would this truck last so long, or go so far? Dale would never have the chance to find out. Dusty blinked and his dry eyes burned, as though longing for tears he could not allow himself to shed.
The hitch thunked onto the ball and Dusty snapped the latch home. He was hooking up the safety chains as a pickup pulled into the office parking lot. Plugging
in the lights, Dusty smacked the dust from his hands and straightened.