Crecheling (18 page)

“You from the System?” the woman called.

“Outrider!” Dyan snapped back.

It was enough. The guardswoman and her colleagues opened the gate and let Dyan and her friends in. Dyan paid for two stalls in a stable with Scrip rectangles she found in Outrider Lorne’s saddlebags, and rather than spend more and risk contact with more people, they shoved a yawning gray dog out of its place and bunked beside the horses.

Eirig curled up into a ball in the hay and continued sleeping.

Jak lay flat on his back staring at the ceiling. When Dyan reached out and touched him softly, and sang to him all that she knew of the Gallows Song, he crawled over next to her and pressed himself against her body.

He fell asleep instantly, and in his sleep, he wept.

***

Chapter Nineteen

In the morning, when Dyan opened her eyes, Jak lay on her breast. His breathing was regular and his eyes, though red and puffy, were relaxed in sleep. She ran her fingers through his hair and wondered what was next.

“Sausages,” Eirig said.

“What?” Dyan snapped her head around, startled by the intrusion into her solitude, and found Eirig climbing over the wooden gate into the stable. Over the earthy, pungent smells of horse and hay, Dyan’s nose detected juicy, hot sausage, and her mouth began to water.

Jak sat up, rubbing his face. Eirig dropped into the stall with three wooden skewers in his hands, and on each skewer, a taut, sizzling piece of meat.

“How did you pay for those?” Dyan wondered.

“Who did you steal these from?” Jak asked at the same moment, grinning his approval.

“Ah, now you shame me,” Eirig objected. He handed them each a skewer and took a careful bite of his own sausage. “I worked for these. You two were still asleep when it got light, so I walked around and found an innkeeper. She had three sausages she didn’t want, and a pile of wood she needed chopped.”

Dyan tasted her sausage. She burnt her tongue but it was sweet and savory at the same time, pork with some sort of spice she thought might be fennel. “Is this Basku?” she asked.

“How did you chop wood with just one arm?” Jak wanted to know.

“Just like I did with two arms,” Eirig explained. “Only slower.”

“It’s not Basku,” Jak answered her question. “Basku sausage is red, and really spicy.”

Dyan didn’t care. She had eaten a full dinner at Aleena’s cabin, but the night of riding had left her ravenous. She wolfed the meat down, ignoring the scorching twinges in her lips and tongue as she ate it. She finished before either of the boys did and immediately wiped her hands on the straw and stood, to avoid staring at their food and giving them the idea that they should share.

“We need to get out of here,” she announced. “We need to get more distance between us and the Outriders, and get somewhere we can disappear and be safe.”

“The Wahai,” Jak said. “Across the water.”

Dyan nodded. “Let’s pack up and go find a boat.”

The morning was already warm and they led their horses down the dirt streets of Nemap to its wharf. Chickens scattered out of their path as they went, and mangy dogs on the run from boys with sticks. Dyan picked straws from her coat and tugged her clothing into position. She couldn’t very well wear her goggles in the daytime and she wished she had an Outrider’s bandanna, but she tried to make herself look as orderly as possible by the time they reached the shore of the Lull Sea.

Jak and Eirig seemed to be accepting her lead without question, but Dyan questioned herself. She wanted to get across the Lull and into the Wahai, and she thought they’d need the horses there. But she wanted to get there quickly, and disrupt the physical trail, if possible. She didn’t think Shad could track her through Nemap, but she wanted to be sure.

So she needed a large boat, large enough to carry horses. She found one.

It was a wide, flat-bottomed craft, with outrigged pontoons and piles of tradings goods. Dyan saw sacks of grain and stacked hides, but manufactured goods predominated: boots and shoes, saddles, horseshoes, coats, shovels, hammers, axes, sawn boards, and so forth.

Three brown-skinned, wiry men wearing cotton trousers and nothing else finished loading goods into the boat and checked its lines and sail. A heavier man with a prominent Adam’s apple in a sag-fleshed neck checked over a list of his cargo, making adjustments with a bit of charcoal. He squinted at Dyan when she cleared her throat.

“Outrider Zarah,” she said. She tried to speak with authority, but felt a twinge of embarrassment at using Zarah’s name. She hadn’t meant to do so, it had just come out when she realized she had to introduce herself.

“My cargo’s clean,” he snapped back.

“I need passage to the other side of the Sea,” she said. “I don’t care about your cargo.”

He relaxed visibly. “What do you mean?” he asked, looking over her shoulder. “Do you mean just for you?”

“Me, those two, and the horses,” Dyan said. “I can pay.”

The merchant’s eyes narrowed. “That’s refreshing.”

“Not much,” Dyan hastened to add.

He chuckled sourly. “That’s more like it.” He sighed and scratched his head, staining the whitish thatch with black from the charcoal he still held in his hand. “Look,” he said, “I’m running short on time. If you can have your prisoners help with the loading, I’ll get one of my men to clear a space in the hold for the animals.”

Dyan tried to think like a hard-nosed Outrider. “You expect help loading and Scrip, too?” she pushed.

The heavy man bowed his head. “Whatever Buza System thinks my services are worth,” he said quickly, “I am happy to agree.” Then he turned and shouted harsh-sounding words to his crew in a language Dyan didn’t understand.

Prisoners?
Jak mouthed to her, but he and Eirig piled timbers and hand tools, and a few minutes later one of the nut-brown crew opened a large hatch in the deck. Clucking and saying words Dyan didn’t understand, he took the two horses from her and led them up the gangplank and down into the hold.

When the last barrel of nails was roped into place, the crew untied the ship from the wharf and raised the yellow-white sail. A stiff breeze tugged the sail out and scooted the ship slowly out from the wharf and into deeper water. The Wahai Mountains, blue-brown and snow-hatted, seemed larger by the minute.

Jak and Eirig sat quietly by Dyan on crates in the aft of the ship’s deck, and she pretended to watch them closely. Once the ship was safely out of Nemap, its skipper joined her, offering her half of a round wheel of soft bread.

“Thank you,” she said. “They haven’t eaten for a couple of days.” She tore herself a piece of the bread and passed the rest to Jak and Eirig.

“Going the wrong way, aren’t you?” The trader chewed bread in his cheek as he talked and looked closely at Dyan’s face. “With prisoners, I mean? Usually, you Outriders kill them on the spot. And when you don’t, if you transport them anywhere, it’s back to Buza System, not out into the Wahai.”

“They’re not exactly prisoners,” she said. She tried to be tough like Cheela, and quiet like Shad. She didn’t like the trader’s curiosity, but she thought that was okay, because a real Outrider wouldn’t like it, either.

“Oh yeah? What are they, then?”

She didn’t want to rebuke the man or give him any other reason to hate her, or even remember her. Instead, she changed the subject. On a whim, inspired by the fact that she was crossing the Lull Sea and entering the Wahai, she asked: “Why don’t you sail west?”

“Beg your pardon?” The merchant looked confused. “I assumed you were going to one of the trading posts. If you want to go to the Dam, I can take you, but I’d rather do it on my return trip.”

“I don’t mean the Dam,” she said. “I mean beyond the Dam. You’re a sailor. Don’t you ever get tired of sailing back on forth on this tiny sea? Don’t you ever want to sail west on the Snaik as far as it can go, until you come to the ocean?”

He squinted at her, eyes glittering and dark. “Are you asking me if I’m a
smuggler
, Outrider?”

Dyan forced a laugh. “I meant to ask if you were an
explorer
. Haven’t you ever wanted to sail west and see what you could see?”

The trader spat over the gunwale and into the water. “I’ve known men who’ve done that,” he said slowly. “Those who weren’t killed by the Shoshan, or bandits, or wild animals, came back with stories of nothing. Hundreds of miles of nothing at all.”

“Anything else?” Dyan asked.

He shrugged. “Wild stories of ruins, some of them. Ruins on the shores of the ocean. From the days of the Cataclysm, I guess, but I don’t know, and I don’t really care. Because here’s the thing, Outrider.” He stared at her with a sour eye. “I don’t care about exploring. I don’t care about any ocean, I don’t care about any ruins and I don’t care about the Cataclysm. What I care about is making a profit, and that’s why I sail the Lull Sea. The crazies out there herding sheep and mining and the crazies on this side farming and making furniture are all the same—a bad year will ruin them. Insects in the crop mean the farmer starves. Sickness in the hooves of the herd means a cull, and death comes even to healthy animals. Bad luck on your stream, or claim-jumpers, means a miner dies a solitary death. The only one who prospers in all this, the only person who always prospers, is the trader. Because no matter what, all the crazies need someone to run around between them, carrying their goods to each other and making a profit. That’s what I do because that’s what I care about.” Dyan felt his eye boring into her forehead. “Making a profit.”

“Well,” Dyan said, “to each his Calling.”

She handed several rectangles of Scrip to the trader, careful not to look too carefully at them or show her uncertainty at how he would react. He didn’t look at the Scrip either, just took it, slapped two fingers to his forehead in a sloppy salute, and returned to the work of bellowing at his crew.

“Thank you for making me
not exactly
a prisoner,” Eirig said when he was gone. “My old dad would be proud. I’ve finally become what he always dreamed I’d be.”

“Well done,” Jak told her. He reached over and squeezed her hand, and his expression was one of real gratitude.

“Why were you asking him about the west, though?” Eirig asked. “If that was small talk, it’s small talk like I’ve never heard before. I’m used to hearing
so, Ira, how are the chickens doing this year? Oh, the poultry are fine, Jeet, but you know I’ve never really recovered from that cough and now half the kids have some kind of gut worm.
”

Dyan wanted to giggle, but didn’t think it would look right in her Outrider costume. Instead, she shrugged and smiled. “I just wonder,” she said. “The Magisters never taught us anything about what might be downriver on the Snaik, except for exactly the same things the trader just told me. Bandits and wild animals, ruins, lands so blighted by the Cataclysm that it isn’t safe even to pass through, and that sort of thing. But I wonder if that can be true.”

“What do you mean?” Jak scratched behind his ear.

“I mean, the world’s a big place. I can tell you from geology and physics that the world is a ball about twenty-four thousands miles around and about seven thousand miles through the center. That’s an awful lot of space. Can it really all be destroyed, wasted, nothing? Can Buza System and the settlements really be all that there is? Or might some of those ruins that I’ve been told about really be populated?”

“Holy Mother,” Eirig gulped.

“Other Systems?” Jak asked.

“Maybe,” Dyan said. “Or maybe human settlements without Systems. Just … you know … people, without anyone from a System coming out to Cull their children. Just people living together.”

Eirig’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “The earth is a
ball
?”

“Uh …” Dyan was uncertain what to say.

Jak punched his friend and Eirig laughed.

“My old dad always told me that the world was shaped like a giant turd,” Eirig said. “He was such a traveler, I assumed he knew what he was talking about.”

“
Life
,” Jak said, “not the
world
. Your old dad always said that
life
was a turd.”

“Isn’t it the truth, though?” Eirig shook his head. “And it’s the very best people who always get the worst part of the turd, isn’t it?”

He put his arm around Jak and grinned. Jak grinned back, but there was a tear in his eye.

“Well,” Dyan said, “it’s too bad the world isn’t shaped like a turd. A cylinder would be much easier to map than a sphere.”

“Ah, you misunderstand me again,” Eirig said. “That’s my fate, I guess. No, the world isn’t shaped like a
human
turd, you see. It’s a cowpat, a great big cowpat of a world, and we’re all on the underside of it, smashed against the ground.”

“Are there maps?” Jak asked. His eyes still glistened, but there was a hard fire behind them now.

Dyan shook her head. “I never saw any maps. The Cataclysm changed the face of the earth, we were told, so the old maps were pointless, and no one sent out from the System has ever returned with the information to produce a new one. I know place names, from pre-Cataclysm history, and I can tell you a little about where they are. Sayatil and Portolan should be west of here, for instance.” She considered. “Maybe those are the ruins the trader is talking about. They were supposed to be large cities. And somewhere away to the south was Satulak. But the country’s capital, back before the world broke, was in a place called Washatun, which was far away to the east.”

“On the other side of the Jawtooths,” Eirig said, “or my old dad would have mentioned it.”

“Much further than that,” she corrected him. “I think …” she tried to remember stories that might have any bearing on how far Washatun might be. The Cataclysm had so thoroughly changed things that most historians didn’t bother studying anything that happened before it. Or maybe they didn’t have the information. But she remembered legends of people in carts and wagons, coming to Satulak and Buza on foot over many months from Novoo and Chakag. And Washatun was much further away still. “I think maybe so far that it would take years of walking to reach it.”

“Years!” Jak whistled low. “How did they possibly control everyone?”

“Control?” Dyan was startled. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you think that makes sense?” he asked. “Buza System controls everything in the Treasure Valley, and all the settlements around it. But as powerful as the System is, it couldn’t control something that was a year’s travel away.”

Dyan struggled for an answer. “Lots of things were different before the Cataclysm,” she said. “I think they traveled much faster. And even faster than travel was information sharing.”

Jak frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I mean … even though a messenger might take a year to cross the country, there were tools to send messages much faster. Maybe instantaneously.”

“That can’t be true,” Jak said. “Can it?”