Solatium (Emanations, an urban fantasy series Book 2) (33 page)

“My aunt, who stood beside me, said, ‘The eye.’

“I looked and saw that organ just below the water — the size of a charger and, at first, flat black. But as the beast swam closer, I realized its eye was not black through and through. A cobalt-blue iris moved within that darkness, and at its center, a dark slot narrowed as it looked up at us in the bright air. Around the iris was a ring of pale blue. As I watched, the pale ring flashed silver.

“Without a word, my aunt lifted herself over the ship’s rail and fell toward the water below. Even as I took a breath to cry out for help, the beast lunged and engulfed her, its jaws extending from its mouth with a great, sideways sweep. Blood flowered for a moment on the water’s surface and then the ship’s passage swirled it into nothingness.

“A time passed in shocked silence. It seemed to last forever but was probably just a few seconds. Then my mother sent up a terrible cry and drew back her arm. No doubt she intended to use her gift of fire against the beast.

“The ship’s captain seized her in a barrier, then wrapped his arms around her. ‘Not against that one,’ he said in her ear. ‘Never that one.’

“The creature swam beside us a bit longer, then sank slowly into the darkness. We watched the water and waited, but it did not return.”

We rode on in silence for a time.

“Dunno if I liked that one so much,” Terry finally said.

He’d spoken in English, and the language change seemed to break the story’s spell. We all relaxed a bit.

“Did the captain ever explain why he grabbed your mother?” I said.

“I don’t know any more than I’ve told you,” Mizzy said. “It didn’t happen to me. Or to the person who told me the story.”

“Do you think …,” I said slowly. “Could the shark and the beautiful man be one and the same?”

“What an idea!”

“‘What an idea’ isn’t an answer.”

Mizzy laughed softly. “That’s true.”

A shiver went up my spine. As it was probably supposed to.

“You’re being too literal,” Williams said.

We all looked at him, surprised. He never commented on Mizzy’s stories.

When he didn’t continue, I asked what he meant.

He shrugged. If it’s possible for someone’s back to look annoyed, his did.

“Come on,” Mizzy said, shooting a conspiratorial glance my way. “Give us your analysis. I’m sure we’d all get a kick out of it.”

Williams shifted uncomfortably. “It’s an allegory.”

I thought about it.

“Of loss?”

No
, I thought,
not just loss. The way you respond to loss
.

“Or maybe despair?”

Yeah, that seemed right.

“The way grief is always inside you,” I said slowly, “under the surface, like the shark under the ship. It comes up, and you see what you’ve lost in everything around you, like the silver ring in the shark’s eye. The whole world reflects it at you. Or maybe you impose it on the world, even in places where it doesn’t belong.”

Williams didn’t say anything.

I glanced over at Mizzy, but she was looking down and away, toward the city beneath us.

Abruptly, the topic of discussion felt very much closed.

We rode on, and I pondered the story in silence.

The way you turn loss into a plague that infects everything
, I thought.
The way you destroy yourself
.

That afternoon, we entered Kye Wodor.

Like Free, it was a place built on trade, but the resemblance stopped there. Kye Wodor was a bustling port city, surrounded by suburbs. Just up from the riverside, several dozen blocks of five- and six-story stone buildings formed a distinct downtown. South of that, less densely packed cityscape and suburban development stretched up toward the tree line in a gentle arc.

Our route took us from the northeastern suburbs down through the city center and into a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood on the west side. All told, we rode through several miles of development. It was a sizeable place.

Kevin suggested an inn he’d used before, and we wasted no time getting settled. The baths were hot, the food was good, and the beds were soft. It felt like heaven.

The next morning, the inn-keeper recommended a local healer named Hagut Kidron who was supposed to be very strong. Williams walked me over there and scared poor Hagut half to death with a demand for confidentiality backed up by a full-on glower. Once she recovered herself, the healer finally got rid of my cough and scabby feet. That was heaven-plus-one. She even gave me a fresh pair of socks.

“So where are we going?” I said as we left.

“Seeing people,” Williams said.

“What people?”

He didn’t answer.

“Guides for the next stage?”

Zilch.

Good lord
. You couldn’t even goad him, like you could Yellin. He was immovable.

If anything could make me wish my gift were functional, it was Williams. Being able to set the man’s pants on fire would be awesome.

I stuck reasonably close as we navigated the bustling city streets, but stopped a few times to look at the wares laid out in front of shops. It wasn’t a terribly effective form of resistance — I got all of about two seconds to peruse the merchandize before a giant hand landed on my shoulder, and we were underway again.

We ended up in the home of an elderly man who, weirdly, called Williams “Leontios.”

The guy was cut from the same cloth as Williams: he ignored me completely.

As the two of them spoke, I pieced together that the man was a merchant who’d just had a caravan arrive through Ancient Inland. According to him, the drought there was severe — he’d lost several camels. He said he was going to reroute his trade, for the time being.

After the meeting, one of the merchant’s servants showed us back out to the street. Williams headed north. I hurried to keep up.

“Is there a different route we could take besides Ancient Inland?”

“Yes.”

“Are we going to take it?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He shot me an annoyed look and kept walking.

“You just spent twenty minutes talking to that merchant, and you can’t spare me a sentence?”

“Talking to him was useful.”

Unbelievable. What an asshole.

“Talking to me might keep me from killing you,” I muttered.

I didn’t really mean anything by it. It’s just the kind of thing people say when they’re pissed off.

But I wasn’t like most people. The day would come when I’d be able to kill and would probably be forced to. The thought nauseated me.

This kind of thing happened occasionally. I’d be going along, feeling like a normal person, and then some random thing would remind me of my gift when I wasn’t prepared. It was a gut-punch.

Williams stopped and looked at me with a strange expression. It wasn’t surprise or offense or anger. It certainly wasn’t fear.

Attention. He was studying me.

I looked away, aware that what I was feeling was written all over my face.

Williams waited as I regained my self-possession. Then he said, “The other way’s too long — eight more strata instead of one. Cordus will be in default if you don’t get to the ice men within a year.”

He looked at me for another long moment, probably to make sure I wasn’t going to torment him with demands for further speech, then continued on his way.

I trailed along behind, surprised that Williams had passed that information along. I’d already realized the solatium thing was for real, but I’d gotten the strong impression Williams was in neither-confirm-nor-deny mode.

So, Cordus’s agreement with the ice men has an expiration date.

I could get him in trouble.

Excellent.

Then again, I didn’t want my sentence to be any longer than it had to be.

All of us met in the inn’s common room for dinner.

Williams reported that the people he’d talked to — the merchant and a camel dealer we’d gone to see afterwards — both said Ancient Inland’s drought was the worst anyone could remember.

Kevin and Terry had also spent the day talking to people they knew around town. They’d heard the same thing.

“A caravan leaves in two days,” Kevin said. “We need to join it. With the wells running low, it may be the last one for a long time.”

“What’s Ancient Inland like?” I said.

“It’s the interior of a giant island continent,” Mizzy said. “It’s arid. There’s usually a monsoon season, but the rains have failed the last three years.”

“Is it an old place?”

“Yeah. Quite.”

In S-Em terms, that probably meant pre-dinosaurs. Of course, just because the stratum had been made before dinosaurs existed didn’t mean they hadn’t colonized it. And even if they hadn’t, there were probably plenty of dangerous animals there. Dinosaurs hadn’t evolved from bunny rabbits and pussy willows.

The group started hashing out what we’d need and who would take care of which items. Mizzy would buy camels. Kevin would contract with the caravan leader and arrange for ferrying across the river. Ida would buy food and camping equipment. Terry said he’d pack the bags.

I knew I’d be tagging along with Williams. When I asked him what was on our agenda, he said he had to sell the horses.

“What?” I was shocked. “You can’t sell Bertha.”

He shrugged. “Can’t take ’em with us.”

“Why not?”

“Not enough water. Too hot.”

What was this place? The Sahara?

“How hot does it get there?”

“One-twenty, one-thirty.”

“One hundred thirty degrees? Are you serious?”

His glance said,
Why would I bother saying something I didn’t mean when speech is torture?

“Can people live in that kind of heat?”

“Not easily.”

“So … what am I missing? We have to travel a long way there, don’t we?”

“It’s spring there — hopefully not that hot, yet. We’ll take shade with us. Travel at night, when it’s cold.”

“How cold?”

He shrugged. “Around freezing.”

Oh, man
. It was hard to imagine a place where the temperature could swing a hundred degrees over the course of the day.

And I’d been thinking nothing could be worse than Gold Rush’s dino-infested jungle. I should’ve known better — you should never even think the phrase “nothing could be worse.” Total jinx.

The next day, everyone ate a quick breakfast and then scattered to take care of business.

Williams was the only one who didn’t seem to be in a hurry. Instead of heading out, he sat in the inn’s common room and cleaned his blades and firearms.

All I could do was wait.

I spent a while reading the local newspaper. It looked old fashioned, with squished-tight rows of text and no pictures, but the language seemed pretty standard. So long as I went slowly, I understood most of it. Newsworthy events included increased dinosaur activity along the major highland roadways, a drunken brawl down by the wharfs, and the sad case of a missing woman whose body had been found in the river.

An amusing sidebar on an inside page contained interviews with three local people with weird gifts — the sort often referred to as “quirks.” One of them was a man who could make other people’s hair grow faster. Fittingly, he’d become a barber. He joked that he’d never had to be a particularly good barber, since he could always regrow what he cut and try again.