Children of the Wastes (The Aionach Saga Book 2) (18 page)

“I used to comfort you when you were a nestling,” Mama said
wistfully. “Now look at me. I’m old, and you’re the one who knows best.”

“Don’t be silly.” Lizneth knelt in front of the rocker and
threw her arms around Mama’s neck. When Mama hugged back, Lizneth could feel
how thin and frail she’d become. A sudden fear gripped her; the road ahead was
a long one, and her parents had been having enough trouble moving about the
cottage. Lizneth couldn’t imagine who she’d be without Mama. If anything
happened to her… she couldn’t bear to think of it any longer.

“Where we going, Papa?” Malak was asking.

“We’re going on a travel,
cuzhe
.”

“To where?”

“You just pack your things, son. I’ll tell you all about it
when we’re underway.”

The nestlings, still dreary with sleep, did less to help pack
than to cause confusion and disarray. After what felt like hours, Lizneth and
her prodigious family left the cottage and headed north through the tunnels.
They sounded like a traveling carnival, and there was little Lizneth or her
parents could do to keep them quiet. Their only hope of escaping the
calaihn
was to get as far from Tanley as possible.

For hours they trekked through the northern below-world on
their way to Molehind. Despite the darkness, Lizneth’s head swam with the
memory of Tanley in flames. Bright spots still burned in her vision. She
thought of her family’s meager, secluded cottage and wondered if the
calaihn
might miss it altogether. With the harvest lost, the cottage was the only thing
they had left. She could only hope their home was still standing when they
returned—if they ever did.

CHAPTER 15

The Blackhand’s Return

Raith Entradi sat in the shade of his lean-to, spinning
Lethari’s scorpion seal through his fingers as he stared out across the desert
of a late sunset. The others were sleeping around him. He could see the horses
working at a stand of grass in the distance, a diminishing luxury in this
increasingly dry landscape. The animals were thinning out, and the men had
begun to ride less and walk more.

Belmond was within reach. So said Borain Guaidir, their nomad
guide, who was the first of the others to stir. He opened one narrow brown eye
and stared at Raith for a moment before following with the other.

Borain was a quiet man, though friendly enough and confident
in his abilities. He’d taught them as they traversed the wasteland, pointing
out edible plants and demonstrating how to prepare them, showing them how to
watch the light-star for the best times to travel and the best times to rest.
This meant sleeping during the hottest parts of the day and often traveling
straight through the night without a break. The soft linen clothing they’d
purchased in Sai Calgoar was better in the heat than their synthetic garb from
Decylum, and they’d been able to travel faster in the darkness without flatbeds
or rolling cages or herds of livestock to hinder them.

This desert journey had been more eventful than the others.
It seemed to Raith that traveling in a smaller group had made them less
frightening to some of the wasteland’s rarer wildlife. They’d encountered, at a
distance, a herd of wild sandbred horses, a pack of feral dogs, and a kettle of
vultures circling some far-off prey. Up close, the sightings had been almost as
frequent: bushcats and scorpions at night, ravens at daybreak, bats at dusk,
bearded lizards all through the day, and a strange thing with fur along its
sides and exoskeletal plates across its back called a murbider. Borain assured
them that while the trundling little creature looked harmless, it would become
as ferocious as a carcajou if provoked.

Jiren had been adamant that they steer clear of Scarred
territory, so they’d circled around to the south before approaching the city.
This evening they would turn northwest and enter Belmond at its southern
border.

When night fell, they packed their things and rode toward a
point on the horizon where fires sprang up to light the old suburban district.
Sand turned to asphalt, and the winding streets led them through neighborhoods
where crumpled houses crowned dead brown lawns. Cracked swimming pools held
puddles of murky sludge; graffiti murals sprawled across brick and vinyl
siding. The suburban buildings were low and spread out, strip malls and
community centers and restaurants on the verge of collapse. And then, the city.

“I take you to the factory camp, and then I take my leave,”
Borain said along the way.

Raith looked at him strangely. “What about the way back?”

“I find you.”

“Would it not suit you better to stay with your people at
camp?”

Borain shook his head, but didn’t answer.

By the time they came within sight of the factory’s towering
smokestacks, Borain had grown restless. “I leave you here,” he said. “The camp
is ahead.”

“You’re sure you won’t seek shelter with us there?” asked
Raith.

Borain grunted. “The watchers… they have seen me already. I
dare not go further.”

“What is it with you and this place?” Derrow cut in.

A dark look passed over Borain’s face. “When you make your
return to Sai Calgoar, I join you there.” He pointed to an intersection down
the road where an overturned vehicle lay beneath a fallen traffic light.

“You’ll find us?” Raith asked.

Borain nodded, then wheeled his horse and started off into
the growing darkness.

“Strange dway,” said Derrow, when the nomad had disappeared down
a side street.

“Spend enough time by yourself and you’d turn strange too,”
Jiren said.

“He’s quiet,” said Theodar. “That doesn’t make him strange.”

Jiren disagreed. “It’s the quiet ones you’ve got to watch out
for.”

“I speak,” said Mercer, the sole two words Raith had heard
him speak in days.

They all laughed, except Ernost Bilschkin, who hushed them
quickly. “Let’s hurry up and get out of here. I hate to think about what must
roam this city at night.”

“Never thought I’d see you so anxious to cuddle up with the
nomads,” Derrow chided him.

Jiren chuckled. “We’ll all be slaves before dawn, won’t we
Ernost?”

“Oh, sure, laugh all you want. You won’t be laughing when
some gang of drug-addled ruffians comes along and cuts our throats.”

“That’s enough,” Raith said. “Everyone keep pace. The camp
isn’t far.”

The nomads halted them at the front gate. When Raith flashed
Lethari’s scorpion seal, the guards let them in and closed the gate behind
them. The Sons waited there beneath a nest of pipes and silos and catwalks
while a runner went to alert their warleader.

When word came back, Raith and the others were escorted
around the side of the factory to the secluded inner courtyard. The loading
bays and holding pens that had been bursting with slaves, livestock and foodstuffs
during their last visit now held room to spare.

Though Raith had never met Diarmid Kailendi, he knew the
warleader the moment he saw him.
Power changes a man
, he thought.
His
bearing is stiffer, surer than all the rest
. “Well met, Diarmid,” he said,
extending a hand. Diarmid didn’t take it, so Raith withdrew. “I regret that we
did not meet when last we were here.”

“You are eight in number. My watchers tell me you were nine
when you entered the city. There was another. Name him.”

“Borain Guaidir was our guide through the wasteland,” Raith
said, puzzled.

“Then it is true.
Foirechlier
dares show himself.”
Diarmid snorted, a brief, haughty sound.

Raith said nothing, unable to decipher the meaning of the
unfamiliar word and reluctant to ask about it. It didn’t sound good, and that
was all the inference he needed to leave well enough alone. He looked to
Derrow, who seemed just as baffled.

“You have come for your sand-brothers,” said Diarmid.

“Yes.”

“Inside. This way.” Diarmid glanced at Lethari’s seal, but he
neither mentioned it nor asked for it as he led them into a vast hangar lined
with processing machinery, where only a few small fires burned to ward off the
night. Most of the nomads were camped outside, but their fires were lit where
they wouldn’t be seen from outside the factory. They treated Raith and the Sons
with typical prejudice, dark looks and spitting and muttered curses.

This is the moment that determines our fate
, Raith
thought.
If Wickman Garitall is not among the survivors here, I may have lost
my last hope of keeping my promise to the master-king. My last hope of saving
Ros
.

“My
feiach
has searched the steel city for your
brothers, and these are who we found alive,” Diarmid said, pointing.

At the end of the hangar, huddled around a small fire, sat
four men. Diarmid called to them, and they all looked over at once. Their
lightburned complexions and tattered synthetic clothing pegged them as
Decylumites. Beyond that, Raith wouldn’t have recognized them. He let out a
breath when he saw the yellowed eyes staring at him from bearded faces thick
with dirt. When they stood, they were like four bundles of twigs propping up
tents of skin.

It wasn’t until they came closer that Raith began to catch
glimmers of familiarity in their features. The sad eyes and dark wavy hair of
Hayden Cazalet; the lithe frame of Brence Maisel, who managed to look fit
despite his malnourishment; Tobas Baern’s compulsive facial twitching; and the
missing index finger on Gregar Holdsaard’s right hand. In Decylum, the four men
had been researcher, hunter, nutritionist, and mechanic, respectively. There
was no navigator among them; no Wickman Garitall. And so it seemed to Raith
that the fate of Rostand Beige—along with the Sons’ hope of ever returning
home—must rest elsewhere.

The two groups of Decylumites clashed in a flurry of embraces
and loud salutations. They sat around the fire to share stories and show off
battle wounds. Gregar was the only blackhand among the four survivors, and had
been the last of them to be found by the nomads. He’d spent some ten days
sheltering in a public restroom at the back of an old transit station, getting
his only source of water by licking condensation off the insides of the toilet
tank lids. He’d eventually gotten so hungry he’d resorted to eating whatever
insects he could catch scuttling across the tiles. He claimed the finger he’d
lost working on one of Decylum’s air circulators hadn’t hindered him much.

When Gregar had emerged from the restroom in search of food,
the nomads had surrounded him so suddenly he’d ignited and injured one of them
before they could explain their intent. He’d been so weak by then that the
sleep had taken him in short order, and he’d woken up in the factory camp the
following night. “I was so hungry, I would’ve eaten anything they’d put in
front of me,” he said. “But the food hasn’t been bad at all, thank the fates.”

“I’m surprised to hear they’ve been feeding you at all,”
whispered Ernost Bilschkin, throwing Diarmid Kailendi a furtive glance. “The
four of you look as dry as old parchment… it’s as though you’ve just come off
the wastes.”

“We’ve all
gained
weight since we’ve been here, if you
can believe it,” said Tobas Baern. His eyes twitched, one after the other.

“Is this really all of us that’s left?” asked Brence Maisel.
“Weren’t there like a hundred of us?”

“Closer to eighty,” said Raith. “And yes, this is everyone we
know about. Except—”

“Except Ros,” Derrow cut in. “The king of the nomads took him
hostage to make sure we came back.”

“They have a king?” asked Brence. “Then who’s this clown over
here, walking around like he owns the place?” He hiked a thumb at Diarmid, who
had left guards to watch them while he saw to the camp’s needs as things
settled down for the night.

“The king appoints warleaders to command his armies,” Derrow
explained. “That dway’s just one of them.”

Brence snorted. “Could’ve fooled me…”

“Ah, Raith… that reminds me. Some men came here looking for
you,” said Hayden.

“For me?” Raith asked, startled. “Who?”

Hayden gave a sigh, the sort one makes in the effort of
remembering. “Four men, wearing filtermasks and gray overcoats.”

“When?”

“It was weeks ago now.”

Agents of the Scarred, no doubt
, Raith decided.
Sent
to make me pay for their Commissar’s death
. “What did they want?”

“They didn’t really say.”

When Diarmid returned from his rounds, Raith asked him.

“These men were gray ghosts,” Diarmid replied. “
Tathagliathe
.
They walk with shadows.”

“Who are they?” Raith asked.

“They bring us slaves to sell, and we conduct peaceful
dealings with them. Beyond that, we leave them to their own affairs. That is
all I know of them.”

Hayden agreed. “They left pretty quick once I told them you’d
gone to the nomad city.”

“You told them where I was?”

Hayden tensed, as if only now realizing he’d made a mistake.
“They didn’t seem… I mean, I didn’t think it was a secret where you’d gone.
Thought they were friends of yours. At least, the one seemed like he knew you.
Asked for you by name. Raithur, he called you.”

Raith tried to think back.
There are fewer than a dozen
people in this city who know me by my full name. Unless…
“And you’re sure
these men weren’t from Decylum.”

Hayden smirked. “Raith… I’d know my brethren if I saw them.
Wouldn’t you?”

I’d like to think so
, Raith mused, remembering how
these four men had appeared as strangers moments ago. “You’re sure they gave
you no names?”

“None. I told them I was sure you’d be back soon, and they
just said they’d keep an eye out for you.”

“Did they say anything else that might give us some clue as
to who they were? A word, a place, a situation…”

“Well… I overheard them talking when they first came in, but
I wasn’t really paying attention. I was hard at work on my supper at the time,
and… I don’t see why this is important.”

“Because if someone’s after me, it may mean the difference between
life and death. Do any of you remember any other details about these men?”

Gregar raised his hands in surrender. “I wasn’t there.”

Brence and Tobas claimed they remembered nothing.

“I knew some of these men,” said Diarmid. “Not the one who
was looking for you. He was new to their
feiach
. The others, however…
two brothers and their cousin. Porter is the name of their household. Swydiger,
Cluspith, and Eldridge are the names of the men. The newcomer’s name, I do not
remember.”

Raith asked the Sons if they knew those names. All he got in
reply were vague gestures and a few comments to the negative. “Thank you,
Diarmid. That’s something to go on, at least. Where do these gray ghosts live?”

Diarmid shook his head. “Nowhere. We see them one day, and
they are gone the next. Always on the move, making fear in the lesser
pale-skins of the south. Yet they themselves fear the Scarred
lathcui
.”

“So they’re not allied with the Scarred,” said Raith.

“If they were, they would be no friend to us.”

Raith was bewildered.
Who could these strangers have been,
if not agents of the Scarred? And what did they want with me?
“I suppose
we’ll have to keep one eye over our shoulder while we’re in Belmond.”

“How long will that be?” Tobas asked.

“That depends… do any of you know what became of Wickman
Garitall?”

“The navigator?” asked Brence. “I saw him the night we were
ambushed. We were toward the south end of the column when they started
shooting. I split off from the main group to try and get behind them, get a
look at who they were. Wickman was behind me at first… then he wasn’t. I don’t
know where I lost him. Never saw him again after that.”