Blightborn (33 page)

And then the twister is gone. Moving away. Taking pieces of boats—and the raiders who worked them—off into the corn, into the storm, into the great, big, wide-open nowhere.

ASUNDER

SUNLIGHT. BLUE SKY. A SCANT FEW CLOUDS
.

The Sleeping Dogs fleet sits in the mashed-flat corn as day comes and pushes the piss-blizzard away. Motes of pollen still swirl about in little dust devils reminiscent of the twister, but the greater beast has long fled.

Raider men and women rove the corn, looking for survivors. They’ve already found a few, bloodied and bedraggled, out in the fields. One had a spear of wood sticking out of his leg. Another had a corn leaf neatly, almost surgically, cut through the meat of his cheek, opening his mouth on that side another several inches. The other few were just cut up, bruised, beaten, the corn reaching for a taste of blood.

They also found bodies.

A dozen so far. Broken like stepped-on toys. Some of them barely recognizable. Corn roots already winding around them, pinning them to the dirt.

Cael sweats. He’s back from a shift out there in the stalks. He found one of the bodies. A woman. Head pulped. Face a red, mushy mask. He threw up afterward. The tingling Blight-stem on his chest seemed revolted, too, tightening and twisting there beneath his shirt. So much so he had to clamp his hand down over it so nobody else could see.

The corn still avoids him. As if he is repellent to Hiram’s Golden Prolific. He hopes nobody notices.

Now he’s back. Drinking some water. Eating some rice and beans and green vegetable paste that in the back of his mind he knows are provisions stolen from a depot—maybe the depot where they missed their ride. These are provisions meant for Heartlanders. Other Heartlanders. But Cael’s come around to accepting that the raiders are doing good. They have to be. Anybody who opposes the Empyrean has to be on the side of good.

And so he scoops rice and beans into his mouth. And dreams of plucking lush vegetables from a secret garden. He misses the days when things were perhaps not better, but they were, at least, simpler.

Raiders mill about. Crewmen from all the boats, trawler included: Sully, the cook, who’s reminiscent of a goat; the bosun, Shiree, who, for an old woman, is as strong as a pair of oxen; the sailmaker, Gerhard, who even now is using a knife to cut squares of fabric to patch sails for the fleet. They stand around, jawing about twisters they’ve seen that were bigger, none of them talking about the wounded or the dead because . . . Well, Cael doesn’t know why, but he figures because it’s easier not to.

A hand falls on his shoulder. He spins, sees Striker Mayhew
standing behind him. Big fella. Skin as black as fire-licked iron. Shoulders as wide as the plow on the front of a motorvator. Arms like bundles of rope and chain twisted together.

Cael hasn’t spoken to him much. He hasn’t spoken to many of the men, not even after these weeks out here in the corn. He knows he isn’t one of them. Not really. Not yet.

Mayhew says, “Been meaning to talk to you.”

“Oh, uh. Well. Here I am.”

“Your rifle.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Helluva weapon. Like the old raiders used to carry,” he says. “My father had one. Not a lever-action like yours but a scattergun, with a pump on the front—” Here he mimes the motion of pumping the action on the weapon, and he even makes the noise:
Chuh-chack!
“He lost it, though. Had it taken from him by the August Guard bastards in a fight not far from Blanchard’s Hill.”

He says all this as if it’s supposed to make sense to Cael, so Cael just puts another forkful of food in his mouth and nods.

“You ever do much hunting?” Mayhew asks.

“Used to. Back at the farm. Not with the, ah, rifle, though.” Here Cael pulls out his slingshot, tucked neatly away in his back pocket. “This served me pretty well. Rats and rabbits and such.”

“I’m the hunter for the fleet.”

“I know.” That’s what a striker does. Hunts off the ship most times, and when they stop like this, goes into the corn and scares up food. “Hear you’re pretty good at it, too. You got a fell-deer a couple days ago.”

Cael hasn’t had any of it. Whatever meat came off that thing went to the main-deck crewmen. Didn’t trickle down to the likes of him.

“Eh,” Mayhew says, waving him off. “It wasn’t a healthy animal.”

“Tumors,” Sully chimes in. “Black sacks hanging off the outside, but what’s worse is the inside—the damn tumors have got
roots
that reach out through muscle looking for blood to sustain themselves. Like the Blight. That’s how the tumors survive.” Some of the others give him a look. “Hey, what? I used to be a doctor, not a cook. Kinda the same thing, mostly. Turns out I’m better deboning a rat than I am fixing a broken arm.”

“You and me,” Mayhew says to Cael, “we can do some real damage out here. We should hunt together.”

“Well.” Cael looks around, “I think we’re supposed to be . . . looking for survivors.” He doesn’t say
bodies
.

“Captain wants me to hunt,” Mayhew says. “And I want you with me.”

“The Dead Zone is comin’ up,” the bosun says. Like Cael’s supposed to know what that means.

Sully must see the look on Cael’s face, because he says, “You don’t know the Dead Zone? Corn starts to die off.
Everything
dies off. Just cracked, dry earth with a forest of dead stalks, the hard soil beneath covered in a rime of white powder. I figure it’s a fungus.” He snorts. “Probably something the Empyrean cooked up. Just to mess with us.”

It’s now that Gerhard lifts his head from the sails, a needle clamped between his teeth, a red thread connecting it and the
patch of cloth in his lap. Around the needle he says, “They’re not telling you everything, boy.”

“Oh, here we go,” Sully says, shaking his head.

“It’s the Maize Witch,” Gerhard says, taking the needle out of his mouth and using it to punctuate his words. “It is. She’s out there. In the dead corn. With her army of Blighted.”

At that the leaves-and-stem underneath Cael’s shirt convulses, and he suddenly has to cover it with a hand. Sully gives him a look, eyes narrowing, and he thinks,
I’m busted; he sees it; he knows something’s up
—

But then Sully looks back at Gerhard.

“Maize Witch. She’s just a damn legend.”

“She’s no legend. I haven’t seen her, but I know others who have. She walks the stalks. Starts whispering to you. And you can’t not hear her. If she gets close, she can . . . make you do things. She’ll give you the Blight. Turn you into one of her mindless, diseased slaves.”

Mayhew laughs, big and booming. “I like a woman who can put me in my place. Maybe I should meet this Maize Witch.”

“No, no,” Shiree the bosun says. “Something to it. Maybe the Maize Witch isn’t real, but we all know the Blight is. And sometimes out there in the Dead Zone, men go mad. They think they hear whispers. Men have been known to jump overboard. Run off into the maze of dry, dead stalks and never return.”

Wham
. Mayhew claps Cael on the back, almost knocks the bowl out of his hands. “Forget all that bullshit. You and me. Hunting. I’ve already got my bow. You’ve already got your slingshot. Unless you care to bring the rifle . . .” He grins big and broad.

“Not sure I’m good enough with the rifle to even make it count. Let’s see how I do with the slingshot.”

Mayhew, twenty feet off. The corn here is jungle-thick, and normally it’d be nearly impossible to move through the field without making a stalk-cracking racket. But the corn isn’t cutting him. It parts, just slightly, to let him past. A cheat, but it allows Cael to remain quiet.

Mayhew isn’t making any noise at all, either. The big sonofabitch is easing through the stalks like a piece of paper sliding under a door. Once in a while Cael spies a flash of the man’s dark, sweat-slick skin.

Out here Cael feels centered. Hunting? This is his speed. Feels good to get away from the raiders and the boats, and put the twister and the Blight and even the Maize Witch out of his mind.

A shape, dead ahead.
Mayhew,
he thinks.

But Mayhew couldn’t be there—not that fast.

A person. Obfuscated by the corn. Standing there in the stalks, as still as a dead tree in a bleak orchard. Cael eases forward, starts to make out the shape of the body beyond the stalks: narrow shoulders, a curve to the hips, a flash of long, flaxen hair—

A voice, whispered.

Come to me, Cael
.

A woman’s voice. Both spoken aloud and in his mind. His throat catches his breath. His guts ratchet tight.

He tries to say something, tries to answer, but can’t. The
Blight-vine under his shirt twists and coils like a knot tying and untying itself.

My home is your home.

I am inside you.

Soon we will meet.

Come to me, Cael. . . .

A hand grabs his arm.

He wheels, slingshot up, a hard stone already dropped into the weapon’s pocket—

Mayhew catches his wrist with a firm but gentle grip. It’s a hand big enough to break Cael’s wrist into kindling.

“You okay?” Mayhew asks.

“I . . . I’m just tired, I guess” is what he tells the striker.

“Hey, we’re far enough from the trawler. I wanted to talk to you.”

“Uh. All right.”

“I knew your father.”

“Pop?”

Mayhew nods. “Mm. I was just a boy. My father was a young man. He was one of the Sawtooth Seven. With your father.”

“Sawtooth who?”

“The Seven! The men and women who helped found the Sleeping Dogs. Your father was a great man! I knew as soon as I saw the rifle who it belonged to, and I thought,
I have seen this weapon before
. He is one of our founders. And now I see why you did not tell anyone.”

Cael laughs. “No, I think you got that wrong. I don’t know how my father came to hold the rifle, but he was no raider.”

“Oh, but I think he was. McAvoy. Arthur McAvoy. I remember that name. Not from when I was so young but from later. When my father would talk. Before that day on Blanchard’s Hill.”

The warm day suddenly grows cold. First a sighting of that woman in the corn (
The Maize Witch,
a voice inside his head answers), and now this? Mayhew must be mistaken. His memories fuzzled.

But the questions.
Where did Pop get the rifle? Why did the Empyrean want him so bad?
Pop seemed so meek, so mild, but then of course Cael and his friends discovered his father’s secret garden—and the hobos who had flocked to him as followers.

“I think I need to go back,” Cael mutters.

“Your father was a great man.”

A great raider
.

“Thanks,” Cael says, though that seems a strange response.

Mayhew calls after him as he leaves: “Later we take that rifle out. You need practice! And I want the chance to fire the gun of the great Arthut McAvoy. . . .”

Cael feels sick as he heads back up to the trawler. As if every part of him is breaking away, like bits of a hardtack biscuit yielding to the pressure from a pushing thumb. Gwennie. Wanda. Raiders. The Blight.

And now this. Pop. A raider.

No, hell, not just a raider. But one of the
founders
of the Sleeping Dogs? Jeezum Crow on a jackrabbit!

Everything he thought he knew, a lie.

Everything he had planned for his future, gone.

He heads down belowdecks. Head in a fog.

He’s about to turn left, toward his bunk, but in the other direction—

Lane’s voice. Mumbled. A laugh? A laugh.
What the hell could Lane be laughing at? After last night? Why isn’t he outside helping?

Cael scowls. It was Lane’s fault that the rigging was wrong, that he found himself hanging there like a mouse mere inches from the cat’s mouth.

He grumbles, turns toward Lane’s voice, and heads down the hall.

Lane’s voice comes from behind Captain Killian’s door.

Another laugh.

He tilts his head to listen.

“We should not be in here, Lane Moreau,” Killian says, lip curled into a grin, tongue flicking one of his canine teeth. “In case you haven’t noticed, the day is pregnant with work to be done.”

Lane wraps his arms around Killian’s waist, weaving his fingers together in the small of the raider captain’s back.

“There’s time,” he says, a blush rising to his own cheeks. He can’t believe he’s this bold. But he’s hungry for this, having been denied it so long. It feels good. He moves in for a kiss.

Killian ducks away from the kiss—playful, coy, not a refusal. Still that smile. Still the tongue on teeth.

“You know you want it,” Lane says, and laughs.

“Maybe you should illustrate just how badly
you
want it.” A wicked flash in Killian’s eyes—like sunlight on a sword blade.

Lane nuzzles underneath Killian’s neck. Takes little nibbles, runs his tongue up under the captain’s jawline. Killian moans, chuckles between clenched teeth.

Then Lane feels the captain’s hands on his shoulders.

Easing him downward. To his knees.

Lane smiles and begins unlacing the captain’s pants.