Ashes of the Earth (7 page)

The
missing words sent a chill down his spine. They seemed to cast the
entire page in a different light. To anyone solving its riddle it was
not so much a celebration of the harvest festival as a reminder of
the misery of the exiles. Hadrian had never before heard Jonah refer
to the exiles as rebels. There had been talk of open insurrection
from the camps years earlier, only to die away as the leaders of the
movement had succumbed to disease. Hadrian stared at the words with
new foreboding, trying to convince himself they were just the musings
of an aging scholar.

He
stepped out onto the balcony that adjoined the workshop, where he and
Jonah had stood only two days earlier, when Jonah had been so full of
hope, had spoken of the renaissance to come. He lifted his face into
the cool breeze and gazed out over the water. Once it had been called
a Great Lake but the term had been lost. Survivors strangely avoided
the old place names, as if they too had been extinguished in the
destruction. Everything was the same but everything was different.
Jonah had died and everything was different.

Hadrian
fought a new wave of emotion, a despair so intense he had to grip the
railing for support. As he did so his hand touched a groove in the
wood, a slender eighth-inch channel cut at an angle, spanning the
entire width of the plank that capped the railing. It might have
seemed innocuous, a random defect, a carpenter's error, but he knew
it had not been there when they'd constructed the building. It had
been deliberately cut afterward, and Jonah never engaged in random
acts. Hadrian searched the entire railing, finding two more grooves,
each at different angles.

Retrieving
three pencils from the desk, he laid them on the grooves. They all
pointed to the tripod telescope in the center of the balcony, its
position fixed by marks on the floor near each leg. He swiveled the
instrument to the bearing indicated by the first cut. The end of the
long ridge to the west of Carthage leapt into view, on the other side
of the deep ravine that separated the colony from the reviled camps.
He increased the magnification and a dead oak at the end of the ridge
filled the lens. Hawks sometimes perched there, and a bird roosted
there now. The tree had become part of the colony's folklore.
Vultures were said to rest there after dining on the dead of the
camps.

He
reduced the magnification and turned the scope to the second mark.
Town buildings leapt into view. A corner of Government House. A
tavern. The colony's two theaters. Then, increasing the magnification
again, the most distant of the structures leapt into view. It was the
fish processing plant—more specifically, its roof.

The
third mark aimed directly at the steep slope of the ridge that formed
the settlement's eastern boundary. Nothing was there except large
trees, misshapen from the prevailing northwest wind, and a clearing
at the top where townspeople liked to take picnics. He paused for a
moment, remembering that Jonah kept another, stronger lens tube
somewhere, one they sometimes used to study the moon. He turned to
survey the wreckage inside, spied a wooden box that had been knocked
from a shelf, half its contents spilled onto the floor. Pen nibs,
several old chandelier crystals, a paper knife. Remaining inside was
the little tattered cardboard carton that held the lens.

A
moment later he had inserted the lens and turned the scope back to
the first site. The dead tree could be seen in great detail now, the
bird at its top resolving itself into an eagle. Below it, on the
lowest limb, was a flash of color he'd not seen before. Three long
strips of bright cloth fluttered in the wind, a blue one flanked by
two red ones. It was a signal.

A
rustle caused him to spin around. A young woman was collecting
charred papers from the desk.

"No
cleaning in here!" Hadrian snapped.

"I
was told to help," the woman stammered, glancing nervously at
Hadrian before gazing at the floor.

"Not
in here, not until I say so."

"You
misunderstand, sir. I mean the governor ordered me to help you."

Hadrian
set the papers back on the desk and studied her as she brushed aside
a strand of long russet hair. She was a first-generation colonist, in
her mid-twenties, and would have been pretty had her face not been so
heavily mottled. One in five children born in Carthage had
pigmentation problems. She lifted the book of poems from the desk.

As
Hadrian reached out to pull the book away from her, he noticed the
brown tunic under her quilted jacket. "What exactly is your job,
officer?"

She
stepped back from the desk. "Sergeant. Sergeant Jori Waller,"
she said nervously. "I usually compile evidence for the
tribunals hearing cases, show it to the judges."

Hadrian
frowned. "You mean you're an investigator?" Carthage was
still a small community in many ways but—probably because it
was so small—many of its citizens kept aspects of their lives
secret. So many participated in the black market that its shadow
touched every street. So many had two faces that old timers joked the
population wasn't nine thousand, it was eighteen. The job of the
police, Jonah once had quipped, wasn't to penetrate the secrets but
to make sure people kept their faces straight. Hadrian had never
heard of a real investigator in the colony.

Sergeant
Waller shrugged. "Mostly I just compile the facts in police
reports. Our crimes are always straightforward, usually settled by
the testimony of the arresting officer. A clerical job, really."

"But
you're a sergeant."

She
seemed embarrassed by the comment. "I'm in charge of the
office." Then she added. "There are two others. Paper
pushers."

"And
what exactly did Governor Buchanan say I was doing?"

"Trying
to learn who caused the fire."

Hadrian
inwardly cursed Buchanan. Though he'd promised Hadrian freedom to
conduct his investigation, he still had to have his watcher. Hadrian
pointed to the door. "Go back to Government House. In a few days
I'll come tell you what I found."

The
young woman looked at the floor as she stepped back over the rope and
shut the heavy door behind her. He frowned, then glanced at the book
still in his hands and thought of the exiles. He would have to get
word of Jonah's death to them, even if it meant making the arduous
trip himself. Mail to the camps was forbidden, the trail there often
patrolled to discourage travelers.

He
worked feverishly, mindful of the midday funeral, looking at every
loose paper, leafing through every book for the slips Jonah often set
between pages. There were notes for manufacturing water pipes and
household plumbing systems, designs for building a steam laundry,
even a steam-powered printing press. Yet there was no sign of the
rest of Jonah's secret journal, no pile of layered ashes where it
might have been burnt.

He
paced around the chamber, absently restoring more fallen objects to
their shelves, then paused and turned back to gaze at the desk with
new realization. Jonah had known the governor wanted his secret
chronicle. He would not have kept it in the library.

His
old friend had loved games. Once on Hadrian's birthday he'd designed
a map with the location of little gifts indicated solely by Latin
riddles. Stumbling through the mess underfoot, he absently kicked a
shard of pottery under the desk.

Kneeling
to retrieve it, he glanced up under the tabletop, saw words, and
turned on his back to read them. He recalled helping build the
oversized worktable years earlier out of wood salvaged from shipping
crates. The container ship they'd discovered wrecked on the coast had
provided most of the colony's early salvage. Several sets of words
were scattered across the underside of the table, this end up. lift
here. Korean shipping company. And a long set, in black like the
others, but in smaller letters of what appeared to be an Eastern
European alphabet. No. They were backward. A casual observer would
have dismissed them as vestiges of some foreign tongue gone dead. But
this tongue wasn't dead in Carthage, not so long as Hadrian lived.
The words were in Latin. He found a piece of broken mirror and laid
it on the floor to read the words reflected, quaere verum imprimis.
Seek truth among the first things. The thrill of the discovery died,
giving way to despair again. Jonah's strange humor was going to doom
Hadrian's search before he got truly started.

In
the distance a bell began to peal, calling citizens to the funeral.
Hadrian darted out the door so quickly he almost missed the shadow
that followed him down the stairs.

"You!"
he exclaimed to Sergeant Waller. "I told you there was a
mistake. Go back to your office."

The
policewoman straightened. "I don't know why I am being
punished," she said. "But I do know I am not permitted to
abandon my assignment."

"Punished?"

Waller
looked toward her feet as she replied. "You are a known
criminal. Not just a criminal. A saboteur, a dissident," she
added, as if that was his greatest crime of all. "Everyone in
the corps knows the governor has a file on you."

"Why
would you be punished for leaving when I ordered you to?"

"I
failed my last assignment. If I fail another, Lieutenant Kenton will
have me mucking out the government stables for the next six months."

"Lieutenant?
Since when?"

"Since
yesterday."

Hadrian
winced at the news. "I'm supposed to feel sorry for you because
you were sent to spy on me?"

"If
I help you in any real way, the governor will pronounce me a
conspirator too. If I don't help you, he'll say I disobeyed him."

"So
what will you do?"

"Pretend
to help you?" the sergeant suggested.

Hadrian
gave a bitter grin. "Fine. Here's what you do. Find out if
anyone was working in the library when the fire started. If so,
pretend to ask them questions about who was here, what Jonah was
doing, whether anything strange seemed to be going on."

She
offered a hesitant nod.

"Walk
along the street. Ask passersby if they saw anything. Then write up
your report. Write what the governor wants to hear. Use bold words.
Spice it with rumors gleaned from the street. The citizens grow
concerned over public safety. The people are thankful that running
water had been installed in time to fight the fire. They wonder if
damaged books will be auctioned off for personal latrine use. Twenty
pages at least. The governor favors quantity over quality."

The
sergeant brightened, tore out the frontispiece of the first book
within reach, and began writing.

Outside,
a bass drum began to beat.

The
governing council
of
Carthage declared a state funeral once every two or three years.
Children would be released from school. The colony's antique hearse
would lead a procession of somber leading citizens, followed by one
of the town's two bands playing a dirge. But for the burial of Jonah
Beck, the governor had called out both bands and erected a speaker's
platform at the edge of the cemetery.

Hadrian
stood in the shadow of a maple tree, listening as the leaders of
Carthage extolled the old man. The Savior was invoked, and St. Peter
too. The town had long ago forgotten that their resident wizard was a
Jew. A woman waved a stick of incense over the coffin. An elderly
matron famed for starting the colony's first bank took the podium and
described seeing Jonah flying toward the moon in the shape of a great
white bird. It wasn't so much a funeral as a somber circus. Jonah
would have loved it.

Hadrian
found a patch of grass on a knoll above those gathered and sat. It
was a crisp day, the changing weather pushing vast flocks of geese
and ducks southward, the colony's green and blue flag fluttering at
half mast on the whitewashed pole in the graveyard's center. Police
in brown tunics paced along the fringe of the crowd. An enterprising
vendor sold hot cider, fresh apples, and black armbands. Four men
with shovels waited by the open grave. A square-shouldered man in a
suit, smoking as he leaned against a tree, turned away as he met
Hadrian's gaze. Hadrian had enough of a glimpse of his face to
realize he'd seen the man half an hour earlier, outside the library.
Was he following Hadrian?

Hadrian
tucked his knees against his chest and tried to focus on the
speakers. But his gaze kept returning to the gaping grave, and his
grief returned. Seek truth among the first things. Jonah's voice
spoke the words inside his head, stirring him from his numbness. It
could have been a simple reminder to make truth his priority. It
could also mean to seek it among those at the highest level of
authority. He watched absently as Kenton, wearing his new lieutenant
bars, approached Buchanan. The two men urgently conferred, Kenton
pointing vaguely toward the back of the crowd before retreating with
a scowl, clearly unsatisfied.