Forever the Road (A Rucksack Universe Fantasy Novel) (31 page)

“Here, allow me,” Jade said. She opened the door, all the while returning Kailash’s glare.

Standing in the doorway were two men with everywhere faces, wearing tan pants and white button-down shirts. A strange darkness lurked beneath the fabric of their shirts, but that had to be the trick of light and shadow. There was no mistaking the fear wide in their eyes, their trembling hands hanging in the air and apparently about to knock.

Jade and Kailash broke off their stare.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Jade said.

“Mim!” Rucksack said, nodding to the man on the left. “Pim!” He set his empty glass on the bar. “Well, call the gods a bunch o’ bloody bastards. To what do we owe this honor?”

Jade studied the men’s faces. The jovial mischief she’d seen before was gone, replaced by a timid paleness. “What’s happened?” she asked.

“The alley. The Mystery Chickpea. The black temple.”

“We know,” Rucksack said. “Maybe you should stick to pranks. You’re rather bad at news.”

Mim shook his head. “We know what’s causing the disappearances. We know what happened to the old man.”

“What happened? How do you know?” Kailash replied.

“Please come with us. We’ll show you.”

“Come with you?” Jade said. “You stole Jay’s passport. You blew up one of my taps. You’ve been leading Jay and Rucksack on a wild goose chase around the city. Who do you think you are that we should trust you?”

“We know who we are, Jade Agamuskara Bluegold,” Pim said. “Do you know who you are anymore?”

She said nothing.

“It must be so difficult to be both on the scales as well as the scale itself,” Mim said with gentleness. “I almost don’t envy the dilemma you try not to face.”

“Almost?”
What the hell do you know?
Jade thought.

Mim nodded. “Even if the consequences seem frightening, love is an option for you. Sometimes I wish that was an internal struggle that could threaten to tear me apart.”

Jade stepped between the men, into the bright morning sun. Its heat was a pleasant touch after all the harsh words from everyone in the pub. “You still haven’t answered me,” she said.

Kailash and Rucksack stepped outside and pulled the door closed. Mim and Pim turned to face each other. “We must?” Mim said.

“We must,” Pim replied. “If you don’t trust us after this, we understand. We’ll leave. We won’t interfere anymore.”

Mim shrugged. “Might as well, really. There won’t be anything to interfere with.”

The men turned so they stood side to side. They unbuttoned their shirts down to just above their bellies and pulled the fabric aside. Standing together, side by side, it was as if together their burns formed a single image of a smile. Ragged red, pink, and black flesh started at an opposite point on each man’s chest, arcing down like a scythe blade from a mere dot of red to a black wasteland, three inches at its widest.
 

“He’s returned,” Mim said.

“We suspected,” Kailash replied, her voice low and soft, as if to conceal a tremble. “But we weren’t certain yet.”

The blackened flesh shone like obsidian in the bright sun. Jade’s stomach turned and she looked away. “We’ll go with you,” she said, breathing deeply and forcing her breakfast back down.

All the way to the alley, no one spoke. The Mystery Chickpea still sat empty, quiet, devoid of even the slightest bit of steam. “It looks so ordinary,” Jade said, touching the cart’s splintered wood and peeled paint. But there was nothing beyond the wood. No voice. No feeling. No memory.

“Like everything else in this world,” Kailash said, “the greatest always look the most ordinary.”

“Why is that?” Jade asked.

“They’re too busy doing,” Rucksack smiled, “to worry themselves with putting on a show. Can you tell anything?”

Jade shook her head. “What voice this had, left with the old man. There’s nothing for me to hear.”

The old man’s absence was heavier, more noticeable than his presence had ever seemed.
I never ate there,
Jade thought.
Not once. Though that’s probably for the best. I didn’t even try to speak with him, though I saw him all the time. Now he’s gone.

Jade saw Rucksack’s stare. “You can feel it, can’t you?” he said.

She nodded. “Feel it. Hear it. It’s everywhere.”

Mim and Pim looked at each other. “What is?”

“The fear. The loss,” Jade continued. “If the old man was part of the city’s beginning, the city feels his absence as if part of Agamuskara itself has been cut away. The city is remembering what lies at its heart.”

“The black temple,” Rucksack said.

“The Smiling Fire,” Kailash said.

“Do we have to go down the alley?” Mim asked.

“Not today,” Jade said. “I just need to listen to it, and I can do that from here.”

“That’s a relief,” Pim said, laying his hand softly on his chest. “The closer we get to it, to him… these burn. It’s like they’re going to catch flame.”

Kailash held up her hand. “I don’t know if I can heal you,” she said, “but I can help.”

“No, you can’t,” Pim said. “Not any more than he could consume us. And for the same reason.”

“And what reason is that?” Rucksack asked.

“You really don’t know, do you?” Mim replied.

“Know what?” Kailash said.

“Whenever you’ve seen us,” Pim replied, “we can see the question in you: ‘Why do they look familiar?’”

“The answer is simple,” Mim said. “We used to live among you. In the village.”

Kailash’s eyes widened. “No!” she said, staring closely. “But you—I know you!” She shook her head. “But how can it be? You were among the first to die.”

“And he did kill us,” Pim said. “Mostly.”

“The dia ubh changed us too,” Mim said. “Well, mostly the dia ubh.”

“Mostly?” Kailash said.

“We aren’t fully alive,” Pim said. “We aren’t fully dead. We have our own role to play in this world still. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do. Right down to letting Rucksack and Jay spot us yesterday. But when they chased us to the alley, we don’t know what happened. We neared a red door then all went dark. When we woke, we were inside his temple.”

“The black temple at the end of the alley?” Rucksack asked.

Mim nodded. “’You have to be awake,’ he said to us. ‘You have to be aware.’”

“Did he know who you were?” Rucksack asked. “Did he sense his own lost power in you?”

Pim shook his head. “Whatever he is, he has forgotten so much of the fire that he remembers little of what he once was or what his strength once was. He sips raindrops and believes he drinks oceans.”

“We had nowhere to flee to, no way to fight,” Mim continued. “His mouth opened, red and black and somehow larger than his actual being. He approached us. The air was so hot it burned. And then he… Then he tried to take it back.”

“The fire of life,” Kailash said.

Pim nodded. “It’s like he wanted not to eat us but to consume us, body and soul, mind and fire. He tried.” Pim looked at his torso and grimaced. “How he tried. But you could say it was as if we gave him indigestion. The fire of life is what he wants, all of it, back under his control. But the fire of life is not the fire that burns in us. He leaped away, as if in agony. In the confusion, we were able to flee. Perhaps he feared us. We do not know but we were able to find a door and return to the city.”

“Did it… hurt him?” Jade asked. “Weaken him?”

“I don’t think so,” Mim said. “He is weak, he is afraid, but he is gaining strength and courage. Even afraid, he is as a threatened, cornered animal. He knows now that life is all but completely and forever out of his control. He knows that he has but one chance to regain his former strength, one chance to take back the fire of life.”

“He knows about the dia ubh?” Rucksack asked.

“Yes,” Pim said. “But that’s not all. The old man was there.”

“Alive?” Kailash asked.

Pim shrugged. “No.”

Pain rang through Jade, and she saw the same grief etched into the faces of Kailash and Rucksack.

“We always stopped by when we were in Agamuskara,” Mim said. “Just because you’re not fully alive doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some of the best food in this world.”

Rucksack sighed. “The Smiling Fire took the old man from The Mystery Chickpea?”

“We don’t know why he left,” Pim said. “We just know that he was in the temple and that the Smiling Fire had consumed him. By being in the presence of Jay and the dia ubh, that knowledge now passed to the Smiling Fire. All that knowledge, all that sight… if the Smiling Fire has consumed it and absorbed it, he now sees all the world. He sees the future ahead—what he must do and when he can do it. He knows the mirror eclipse nears. He knows he needs the dia ubh. And he knows about Jay. Jay is in danger.”

“We’re all in danger,” Rucksack said.

“Jay worst of all,” Mim replied. “The Smiling Fire knows Jay needs to be there when the dia ubh opens, so the Smiling Fire can kill him. It’s not just the light. Jay’s blood, his soul, already influenced by the dia ubh, combined with the mirror eclipse and the opened dia ubh, will restore the Smiling Fire to all his former power. And more. He’ll destroy the world. He’ll burn all life to cinders and then eat the cinders. The world will be nothing but ash and his smile again.”

Jade walked over to the walls at the mouth of the alley. She touched her left hand to the white stone. Instead of warmth under the hot sun, a shivering coolness ran through the rock. “It’s as if the very walls of the city are terrified,” she said. No one replied. She closed her eyes and bent her head, listening to the walls of the city.

The walls saw and heard everything, after all, and always had. These first walls of Agamuskara had been erected years after the black temple’s significance had already begun to fade to an oddity, a mere strange formation at the heart of the city, before falling out of memory entirely. The walls heard the songs and stories fade. So many years, so many tales and feelings, so many lives, all absorbed into the stone’s memory.

No faces. No sense of identities. To the long, slow life of the stone, distinguishing human faces and lives was as incomprehensible as a person trying to distinguish raindrops during the monsoon.

She could sense some things though: a young woman, an old man, children chasing a running child. And newer memories. She focused harder.

The young boy followed the older boy. Both were wrapped in purpose and confusion, doubt and fear. The feelings were so fresh. The younger boy followed the older boy down the alley. But only the older boy had come out again.

It had to be the first disappearance.

Next was the old man. He was one of the few things older than the walls, if not older than the stone itself. The wall remembered him for that.

A sudden fear, a sadness had pulled him away from the cart yesterday. But it was more than that. It was concern. Protectiveness.

He left out of love,
Jade thought,
but for who?

The old man crossed into the alley. Then all was a fog from which he did not emerge.

No,
Jade thought.
Not a fog. Smoke from a Smiling Fire.

The old man faded. Now Jade saw something else. More children came down the alley, but not children who lived there or nearby. Children from around the city. Going down the alley.

Not returning.

It didn’t seem like a memory though. It was more like… a vision,
Jade thought
. Am I being shown the future, or what the future could be?

Jade opened her eyes and pulled her hand away from the wall.

She heard a voice say, “Jade?”

Turning, she saw Kailash staring at her with deep worry in her ancient eyes.
She looks more and more like an older mother,
Jade thought. She told them what she had seen.

“What do we do now?” Kailash asked.

Jade stared down the alley, looking away from all of them. The tears were starting. Too many lives. The children. The old man. The love she did not know or understand.

The love I cannot have.

“We need to get Jay feeling better,” Jade said. “Then Rucksack is going to tell him everything.”

“What about you?” Rucksack said.

“What’s happening here is beyond me. Beyond my heart. Beyond what I want. There’s only one thing for me to do,” Jade replied. “I’m going to do my duty.”

“What do you mean?” Kailash asked.

Love is not the traveler’s path,
Jade thought.

“Another story for another time,” she said, walking away from the alley, back toward the pub, alone.

J
IGME RAN
. The crowds parted fearfully, as if he were a runaway truck. No one bumped into him. No one tripped him. No one who knew him or knew of him sneered at the boy with no father, the boy with the mother who had done wrong.

And what wrong had she done?
Jigme thought.
Without a husband, she brought me into the world.

They could all burn. Burn like the old man had. It had been hard to find the courage, but the Smiling Fire had guided him. From there, Jigme had simply gone back to the living end of the alley, watching from behind a wall as Jay had finished eating and left.