Freda: Volume III in the New Eden series (2 page)

“Let’s go,” Dane calls from the doorway. “Leave him.”

Dane would have refused.

“He’s dead, the poor idiot. But he can rest now.”

Wouldn’t he?

I walk faster to catch up to Dane as he hurries down the ramp to the giant track left behind by Darius’ sled. He gives one glance back at the chapel, his face empty of emotion but full of urgency.

“Let’s help the others while they’re still alive, huh?”

Moments later, as we run along the hard-packed, frozen mud road, the dead man’s urgent pleas fill my thoughts. Only Semper can grant absolution. But if I’d had that power, would I have used it?

CHAPTER 2

Even unencumbered, I can’t keep up with the men, who are simply stronger, faster, and more used to this kind of nonstop running than I am. I lost sight of them after the first quarter mile, and I puff along through the trees wondering what they found when they reached the lake. Wondering what I’ll find when I round that final, familiar corner in a moment.

With a sudden dazzling brilliance the lake reveals itself to me. The sky has cleared and hangs a wispy cornflower blue above everything, between the glare of snow-topped western peaks and the forbidden eastern range. The lake, still a quarter mile away, stretches flat and still, like a hundred miles of freshly pressed cloth of unfathomable sapphire blue.

The snow-covered meadow before me is torn in half by a ragged, brown scar running from my feet to the lake, gouged out by the Bomb’s sled. At the far end of the scar stand several figures surrounded by bodies lying in the snow. As I get closer, I recognize those standing as Dane and Patrick and Tom... thank God. A half dozen others lie motionless with crimson auras spreading around them in mud-churned slush.

Beyond them, three Tawtrukk fishing boats float not far offshore. The third and largest has just left the beach, and a quartet of oarsmen pull hard toward deeper water.

I don’t fully understand the scene, but I’ve grown used to this feeling. I knit together the details. Dane won a small battle. Darius and thirty or so men populate three boats, converging not more than a long stone’s throw offshore. Other than the four rowing, the men in the other boats idle at their oars or lean on the sides, staring or jeering at us. Horses wander aimless at the edges of the meadow. A huge flat of wood lies to the side like a solitary, fallen wall in the snow—the sled?

Darius could bring all his men ashore and finish us. Why doesn’t he?

“Darius!” Dane stands with the lake’s gentle waves lapping at his toes as he yells across the short emptiness between us and the boats.

“Yes, Dane, what is it? I’m busy.” Darius replies from the largest of the three boats. “Ah, and I see Freda has come along, too. What a delightful surprise.” He pauses, then waves his hand as if brushing away a fly. “No, I admit, it’s not a surprise at all. But it is delightful, truly. I am so glad you’ll both be on hand for the end of the world. Isn’t it glorious?”

“You’re insane,” Dane shouts back.

“Insane or enlightened. It’s all a matter of your perspective, isn’t it,” he says. It’s not a question. Some of the men on the boat around him laugh, but he does not.

The other two boats drift half-filled with scruffy, dirty men sitting at their oars. They watch us with stoic patience and seem to sense that the fighting is finally over, that the small battle that took place here on the shore was the last clash of Southshawan against Southshawan. They sit with the serene knowledge that they have won.

Dane shouts, “Where are they, Darius? Where are the others?” A whisper would carry across the water in this chill morning blankness, but I’m glad Dane is shouting.

Darius ignores Dane as his boat reaches the other two and his rowers drop their oars to scurry about. Within seconds, they’ve tossed heavy ropes across and tied their prow to the tails of the other two boats. Darius watches, unmoving, until the men return to their seats. Finally, he turns to us, his doggy face smug in a tight grin behind his close-trimmed beard. I recognize the four men at his oars: we met on the battlefield, just three days ago. Behind him, filling the remaining spots where other oarsmen would sit, lies some long, low, hulking thing draped with blankets.

“The others? They should have reached Richards’ Meadow by now, I would think. Then on to the point, where they should have a grand view.”

I can imagine it. Darius kept these thirty men with him but sent the others to march all the people of Southshaw halfway up the lake. Are my parents among them? Was that man in the chapel lying about Jingham’s barn?

Richards’ Meadow is miles away. The only way we can help those people is to stop Darius here, but there’s no way we can reach him. He floats only a few dozen yards offshore, but the lake’s floor drops off like a cliff, and even if we could swim in the icy water, his men would be eager enough to chop us down as we tried to climb aboard. I glance around, looking for a bow among the corpses, but all we have to attack Darius with are rocks and a couple of hand axes.

“I would invite you to come with us, you know,” Darius continues, “but I don’t trust you to behave. You were always like your father, Dane. He let his compassion obscure the reality of this world. I liked Linkan. He was a kind and generous man. He was my brother.”

Some of his men nod along with him, watching us or watching Darius as he speaks.

“But he was misguided. He did not give as much heed to God’s word as he did to his own feelings. He would rather be loved by his people than obedient to God. Dane, do you know what that thinking breeds? Complacency. Sloth. Weakness. When Linkan caught his own son inventing things, what did he do? Did he punish you to teach you about unleashing evil through pursuit of knowledge? No. He ruffled your hair, and together you walked home laughing, as if returning from an afternoon of... of... fishing.”

I arrive next to Dane, whose sharp breaths belie his outward composure. It must be hard to hear Darius talk about Linkan. It was not so long ago, only six months, that Darius, Dane’s uncle, had his own brother killed in secret and took over Southshaw. In those six months, the time it took for summer to turn to winter, Darius buried three hundred years of peaceful happiness under his nightmare war. And all because he misinterpreted the scripture.

“Original sin, Dane. Pursuing knowledge. Still, right up until your Wifing I had hope for you. Baddock never thought you’d amount to much, but still I hoped. Then, rather than do as you were told, you selected that one—” Darius stabs a finger in my direction—”a nobody girl whose parents had the hubris to teach her to read.”

Dane’s anger reaches a boil and bubbles out in a gravelly yell. “You’re wrong, Darius. About everything.”

“No, Dane,” he interrupts. “It’s you who is wrong.”

He doesn’t bark at us like I expect. He shows no anger. Instead, a serenity and peace lies so thick over him that it chills my blood more than this frozen afternoon ever could.

“You don’t have to do this, Darius,” Dane says, but already I can hear his anger turning into desperation.

Darius hears it, too, and he smiles his doggy smile. “Yes, Dane. Yes, I do. But,” he adds, as if he’s just hit upon a new idea, “if you’d followed my instructions, if you’d gone along with my plan, then I wouldn’t have had to. I would have been able to purge this world of the abominations and mutants surrounding us, and Southshaw could have lived on.”

“They’re not mutants!” Dane yells in full throat now, and he flings his axe at Darius. It flies fast but bounces harmlessly off the side of the boat and splashes into the lake.

“There’s your problem, my boy,” Darius responds, ignoring the attack. “You think they’re human. You wanted to learn about them. You wanted to understand. You continued to pursue knowledge rather than trust in your faith. You became... enamored of them.”

The words cut Dane deep because they touch his hidden truth. Darius points his stare at me, twisting his verbal knife, but he doesn’t know that Dane put to rest long ago any feelings he had for Lupay.

Dane puffs up for another verbal parry, but I know it’s futile. He knows it’s futile, too, but he can’t help fighting back until the very last. Even when he knows it’s impossible to reason with a madman like Darius. We both know in our hearts Darius will not relent, and I can’t watch Dane flounder deeper into frustration.

Before Dane can speak, I shout out into the frigid air. “And now you will destroy them once and for all, is that your plan?”

Darius seems surprised that I spoke. It’s almost as if he forgot I was here.

“Well, yes, of course. But not only them. The entire world.”

Darius turns and grasps the thick, woolen blanket behind him and drags it off, letting it fall to his feet. He slithers sideways to reveal the Bomb behind him. Its long, narrow cylinder stretches out from him nearly the entire length of the boat, black and red and menacing. It points away from us, across the lake toward Tawtrukk. He removes a heavy glove and caresses its frozen metal with his fingertips.

No one really knows the damage that single bomb can do. Can it really destroy the entire world? Can it really destroy anything after three hundred years of sitting in our chapel? Only God really knows.

“You know,” Darius muses, “you made this moment possible. The prophecy really has come true. The thirteenth Semper is, in fact, bringing about the destruction of the world.” He walks along the length of the bomb, carefully holding the rail of the boat, tracing his fingers along the smooth red lines in its black paint.

I want to tell him again how he’s wrong, how he’s misinterpreted the prophecy. The prophecy actually said that after thirteen generations, the world would be healed and we could return to the place of our ancestors. Darius read it wrong, believing it meant that the world would end and we would all be called to God, at whose side we would gather with our ancestors.

“Your father tried to prevent this moment,” Darius continues. “He did not believe sufficiently, so he destroyed the solar cell the ancients had hidden. Then he tried to destroy the book of Prophecies, but I had long before committed it to memory.”

Darius pauses near the front of the bomb. He’s talking louder now. I remember how his voice commanded the entire square during Dane’s promotion ceremony and the Wifing. His presence is undeniable, his voice commanding all the creatures of the valley to listen to his lecture. We stand in silence on the shore, impotent and defeated.

“So, when you returned from the wild and unwittingly delivered this to me,” he says as he turns and lifts a small thing that glints in the dying sunlight, “I knew my reading of the prophecy was correct and that God had literally placed the fate of the world in my hand.”

I haven’t seen that little thing before, but Dane grimaces and shuffles his feet. He recognizes it.

“It took me months of research and study to understand how the little box made music—”

Dane interrupts with, “Research? Study? What about prayer, Darius? Don’t you see how—”

“Shut up, boy!” Darius’ voice roars across the lake and echoes off the buildings behind us. It seems to stir waves on the lake’s surface.

Gently and secretly I grasp Dane’s hand and squeeze it tight. It’s been a long time since we held hands, but the moment compels me to keep close to him. His touch, even though his fingers are ice cold, warms and comforts me. I sense him settling.

“The little box you brought me—”

Dane whispers, “I didn’t bring it to you.”

“—made music from sunlight. A wondrous invention of the ancients. A bit of technology. At first I thought to destroy it, but something, perhaps the hand of God, restrained me. Eventually, I understood why. This was the missing piece, the replacement for the solar cell your father had destroyed.”

The first time I heard those words, after we defeated Darius in Tawtrukk just days ago, they meant nothing to me. Since then, as we rushed through the tunnels of Subterra to get here, I’ve learned from Tom about electricity, and how Subterra knew how to make electricity from the motion of water, and how this little trinket in Darius’ hand can make electricity from sunlight alone. I do not understand it, really, but Tom says that a little electricity may be all Darius needs to detonate the bomb.

“Tonight we will row across the lake to the shores of Tawtrukk. In the morning I shall make the final connections between the solar cell and the bomb, and then we shall see the glory of God in its most powerful form.”

As he speaks, the smooth surface of the lake ripples with the ghostly brush of a cold wind sliding off the snowy peaks to the west. I glance that direction, dismayed to see a thick row of clouds clawing their way over the peaks. They’re sluggish under the weight of a new snowfall, which will slow our evacuation. If there’s anyone left to evacuate.

Darius replaces the solar cell to its hiding place in a pocket inside his woolen coat. He turns away from us and shouts to the other boats, “Row on!” Then, as if we no longer existed, he ignores us as he replaces the blanket over the bomb.

Tom appears beside me and says, “No time to lose. We have, if I guess right, about forty hours before the end of the world.”

I turn to him with a question in my eyes, and I put words to it. “Forty hours? But Darius will make the final connections at first light. You heard him.”

“In the morning, yes, but my friend who examined the diagrams says Darius can only use the solar cell to start a timer. The timer counts twelve hours, unless Darius has figured a way to change it, at which time the bomb detonates.”

Dane is quicker at math than I am, but we both know it doesn’t add up. He says, “But that’s still only about 28 hours.”

Tom points at the snow clouds now obscuring the peaks. “How much light does that thing need to make electricity?”

“No idea,” Dane replies. “I only had it a few minutes before we were captured.”

“Hmm. Well, let’s hope this blizzard keeps the sun away. Let’s go. Where is that barn?”