IN THE MOUNTAINS OF FIRE by Dolores J. Nurss
Volume V: Sharing Insanity
Chapter 58 Wreckage of the Aftermath
Monday,
December 14, 2708 (By the dawn’s
first light we see the evidence of unholy rituals all over the campus. Splashes of blood beside old candles burnt
down to puddles of wax. Animal parts in
awful rearrangement. Stained knives
driven into trees, with blackening red daubs around them in arcane
designs. We jog about the grounds
taking mental notes, before the servants have time to clean them up. Jake needs the pattern, though we dont
know, on the logic level, what they collectively add up to. And oh, I ache for sleep!) By the day’s first light I
finally get the chance to check out the escaped prisoners—and good God! They fought in this shape? If Kiril hadn’t prepped the men for us, we
wouldn’t have stood a chance. I lose any
regret I felt over yesterday’s battle as I clean glass from wounds and dab
salve on burns. It’s okay, they keep
telling me—torture only made them all the more eager to slaughter every soldier
they could reach. “Dosh helped us,” Nishka
tells me, as I treat the burns upon her breasts. “Dosh helped us all escape.” She can never nurse a child. (The more I see, the more I fight to shove down the hatred that
rises to my gorge. They did this to
innocent animals! They’ve made the whole
campus sticky and unclean with their crimes against…Oh God, remind me again
that minors did this, misled, under a dark spell, and at least one of them
apparently possessed outright! Despite everything I see, my traitor stomach growls for
breakfast. My path crosses Jake’s. He nods that we should go to the cafeteria
with the other boys, and heads off to find Don.
All I want to do is bathe, and eat, and go straight to bed, and dream of
anything but this. Ah well, at least
I’ll get one of my wishes.) My fingers still smell like
salve after I clean up and go to breakfast, but it’s better than some of what
I’ve gotten up to my elbows in lately.
Kiril insists on giving me two bowls of porridge—with nuts and butter,
yet—though she herself eats only a little dry toast. She still looks wretched, poor kid, but when
I ask her if she can travel she nods.
Then she asks if she can ride the horse for a day or two. “What horse?” I ask. Grinning, Hekut confesses
to not taking Steddy all the way back to Zofia, instead stabling him with
sympathizers near the crossroads who have kept horses for rebels before. “I brought him up last night. Didn’t you notice?” I stare at the animal for a
moment. “I had other things in
mind,” I say, but it bothers me. I used to be observant. I went through a hideous experiment to make
me observe more than normal people. Hekut starts to make some
crack about Kiril needing exercise, but Nishka smacks him before he can finish,
and I let her. Kiril looks up to her
with gratitude, not expecting so much. “I'm just thinking of her,”
Hekut says, surprising me with tears. He
wipes his nose on his sleeve and then grabs Kiril's hand, swings it a couple
times with an awkward giggle, and then runs away crying. I realize that the kid has no idea of what
constitutes appropriate behavior. And
I'm too busy playing the officer, keeping everybody alive, to teach him. (Immediately after
breakfast Headmaster Weatherbent summons the three of us to him. Loudly, in front of the rest of the students,
he asks, “Randall, Donald, did you two knowingly conceal Jacob’s whereabouts
during his truancy?” “We did, sir”
says Don, and I nod. “Then you shall
share his punishment. To my office!”) And suddenly a terrible
thought dawns on me. Hekut doesn’t
usually take initiative on anything so practical as where to stable a
horse. Tanjin must have whispered a
change of order behind my back. Is Tanjin
turning on me? (I feel every
step on the way up. I love the life of
an agent, except that the occasional twenty-four really knocks the thrill out
of it. I’m in no mood for thrills right
now, anyway. So Jake can forgive me for
groaning when we finally get to the office, only to hear him tell Wallace,
“Assign us the clean-up of the burnt-down building. I need to investigate the vicinity.” “The what?” “The building
that George Winsall burned down. The
Married Teacher’s Quarters. Nobody has
done a thing to clean it up.” Wallace just
stares at him, the whites showing all around his irises. I add, in a
soothing voice, “It’s rather a disgrace, sir.
Glaringly ugly. Best to put all
that out of sight, right?” “Uh, quite right. Quite right.
But, uh, wouldn’t that put you even further behind in your studies?” Don sighs. “We know all this stuff already,
Wallace. We’re grown men, remember? But you can call it punishment, to heap us
with catch-up homework later. I promise
we can flub enough answers on the test to make it convincing.” “Of course. Forgive me; I’ve had so much on my mind
lately. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have
a pile of work waiting for me.” “Certainly, sir,”
I tell him and we leave.) If I can’t trust Tanjin, then I am utterly, completely
alone. (Outside his door
I can’t help but complain. “Tell me you
didn’t just sign us up for heavy manual labor after an all-nighter, Jake!” “Don’t worry,” he
murmurs back. “Nobody can see that
quarter—again—to notice whether we’re working or not. We can all catch a nap in the barn, first,
and none’ll be the wiser. But I do need to investigate the ruins.”) * * * The power of flight entails
responsibility. I can carry more
farther, so I have taken five loads of rifles and bullets to a heart-shaped
cave, due west from the point where three boulders frame the main trunk
road. Or, in Lufti’s code, wives and
pullets now dwell in a heart-shaped grave, on a quest from the gleeful shoulders
by the plain skunk’s toad. I confess
that absentmindedly, in my weariness, I did nibble one leaf before I even
realized what I did, recognizing my actions by the bitterness on my tongue, but
man, that has worn off so fast I wouldn’t have believed it if you told me. Buck up, Deirdre—you have a
long way to go before you finish. Swoop
down, gobble down the sandwich that Kiril hands you before scooping up the next
load, ignore the aches with the smile that they expect, and leap back into the
air again. * * * (“Good God!” Don
gasps. “They left her there, right in
plain sight!” No wonder Wallace
Weatherbent can’t look this way. I throw
my cloak over the naked old woman lightly powdered with snow and ash, before
Jake scoops her up from her smoky resting-place, to carry her to the hut by the
campus graveyard that holds the freezer and the shrouds (though the night did a
pretty good job of freezing her already.)
Meanwhile, Don heads to the
office to report her death. As I trot to keep up with Jake’s long legs (and to warm myself up)
he says, “She died smiling. Happy. Whatever happened, at least she fared better
than the rats and chickens.” Yes, Jake. We all saw the stains upon the wizened
thighs. And I almost weep, to have to
find consolation in a thing like that. At least I welcome a chance not to shove timbers around just
yet. That nap in the cold straw barely
lifted the edge off of my weariness.) That last leaf barely touched my weariness at
all. I ache from my scalp to the soles
of my feet. I’ve gone way past the
ability to fly, and so I trudge with the last pack of medical supplies strapped
to my back like the weight of my command.
I couldn’t have made it this far without that little bit of greenfire,
may Lucinda and Kief forgive me! In the day’s final, golden
light I find the road to Zofia’s home—no longer her old weed-grown ruts, but a
route well-pounded by too many feet.
Just one of those many details that you pray to God the army will
overlook, and then you remember that you’ve given up on prayer, you’re just
going to have to take your chances. (By the time we clear the way to the cellar twilight has
begun. Jake says, “A little light here,
Randy. Don, give him a candy-bar.” Munching on the sweet honey confection, I shine a beam down the
stairs. “My gosh, look at all those
landings! How far do you think this
goes?”) By the time I reach the
porch twilight has begun. Zofia must’ve
already stashed my prior drops of bandages and drugs, from when I’d darted in
and out before, a night-cloud caught in daylight. I didn’t see her or her child on that run,
and I don’t see her now, either, though I catch a glimpse of the little girl,
staring out the window at me before running away. I add my latest haul with a thump upon the
old wood, then sink down to sit beside it.
Zofia comes out immediately, waving Nishka from within to take my burden
and hide it with the rest. Then she pulls
me by the arm to help me in. “I’m all right,” I protest
as she settles me into a chair. “Just a
little tired, is all.” “You’ve been abusing the
poor greenfire bushes, haven’t you?” she scolds lovingly. “Nishka, bring us a bowl of the stew. Now Deirdre, I want you to eat whether you
feel like it or not—you’re a rack of bones.
We’ve got plenty to spare, thanks to you and yours, so don’t hold
back. There...that’s better, isn’t
it?” It does taste better than I expected—in
fact I feel famished. “Now you sit a
bit, then go take a bath when you’ve rested some. I’ll go heat the water now. Folks forget to bathe when they fly on
greenfire—it messes with their routines to stay awake all hours.” She props my feet up for me before she
goes. “That poor little bush—God never
made the good green things for poisoning ourselves.” (“God never made
magentine to poison us,” Jake says, as we descend the stairs in the eerie glow
of the bobbing light that I send before us.
It always startles me whenever Jake speaks of God; he’s so quiet about
his beliefs even (especially!) to me, that reminders of it catch me by
surprise. “But they have enough here to
poison everyone for miles.” “I know,” Don
says, cold sweat glistening on his brow.
“I can feel it from here.” Soon they don’t
need my light. Piles of magentine heap
up in the sixth cellar down, like legendary pirate treasure—and all of it
glows, in a radiance of purply rose, sparkling, scintillating off each
other. “That can’t be good,” I
mutter. It’s not supposed to luminesce
like that. Don swears
suddenly. All of his rings have taken light. “Get out, Don!”
Jake barks. “Now!” Don doesn’t hesitate to run upstairs. I can
hear his panting clear to the top. Jake
tucks his own hands tightly into his armpits as he says, “Randy, see if you can
pick up a crystal.” See if I
can? Okay. I reach down, but the thing won’t budge. I try another. It’s like trying to separate two really
strong magnets. I almost pull it loose,
but it snaps right back in place the moment I take a breath. “Don’t try
anymore,” Jake says. “We’ve learned
enough—let’s get out of here while we can.”
And we hurry up the stairs, breathing heavily. Out in the free
night air, Jake leans down, hands on his knees, taking deep breaths till he
stops feeling faint. “Definitely a toxic
concentration,” he says at last. “We’d better
tell…no, that won’t work, will it?” “Right, Randy.” Jake straightens slowly. “Wallace Weatherbent couldn’t hold the
information in his head for five minutes.
We’ll have to find some way to break the spell, ourselves.” And his face softens with thought. Don shakes his
head. “How’d it all get down
there?” Then he stops, suddenly, as if
sniffing the information from the air—for with that much energy, a
psychometrist like him doesn’t even need to touch what lies below; laying his
hand on the blackened stones of a chimney will suffice, conducting information
from the ground. “Confiscations,” he says after a moment. “It started with confiscations, simply
enough. They’d store contraband under the Married Teacher’s Quarters, the
building set apart, as the safest place to keep it out of the hands of
students. And then they forgot all about
it, except to add more.” He shakes his head. “The
poor fools didn’t understand what they dealt with. They expected it to just lie there, passive,
like the bags of marijuana or the odd switchblade. And so it built up enough power to actively
call students to sneak in and add still more on purpose, even smuggling it from
outside…sleepwalking, more than half the time, especially in the last years
when nobody could see the place by day. For
the longest time the only message that the magentine received, to tell it of
its purpose, was to accept more and more additions.” Jake says, “And then Alroy’s spirit, roaming the earth, found it
and gave it purpose. No wonder he could
achieve so much, even when we healed the gregor in the baby-corpse.” “No, not quite,” Don say, his brow crinkling in puzzlement. “He kind of got sucked in here, like
everything else. Alroy didn’t really
have much interest in a stuffy old boy’s school on the other side of the world,
though he didn’t mind imbibing power where he found it. Something activated it locally, some old
tragedy, long hidden and rotting in the dark.
Some…” and suddenly he scowled.
“Weatherbent! He hates himself,
and his self-hatred infects everything.
But why?” “Can’t you read it?” I ask. His brows knit in concentration, but then they suddenly relax as
he shakes his head and releases the chimney-stone. “No.
All I can pick up is “Don’t remember!
Don’t remember!” over and over, coiling in upon itself into a Gordian
knot.” “Well, he certainly hates women,” I say. “We can start there.” “Nooo,” Don says, perplexedly.
“If anything, he pities them. But
he doesn’t want to remember. He has
banished all femininity from the campus because he can't bear to remember.” Thoughtfully Jake says, “Alroy wouldn’t have been able to use that
kind of energy, not for long. He
obsessed on completion, in everything.
He embraced evil because he saw it as the completion of good. He began by wanting to serve good.” Quietly I ask, “Could his ghost be trying to complete this
campus?” “That’s it!” Jake cries, smacking me on the shoulder, sending up a
puff of ash in the dark. “Some remnant
latched onto this power, but only in recent years, and has been trying to
complete the force he found here.” He laughs, harshly. “Alroy’s actually trying to heal it! His way.
And so he works through the longing of the students—the young ones
longing for their mothers, the older ones for lovers—which Weatherbent till now
had successfully repressed, to the point of generating an anti-female gregor on
the campus. But of course even Alroy’s
ghost soils everything he touches.” Don sits down on a fallen beam and takes his face into his
hand. “Oh Lord. You do realize that every educated man in
this country has graduated from Toulin Academy for generations under
Weatherbent? No wonder the culture’s gone
so off-kilter. Remember that strangling
dog at the pier? The huntsman gave him
mercy, but harsh and out of balance.
Even after they leave the school, men go about with the feminine blocked
inside.” “Go easy on him, nevertheless.” I don’t have the psi perceptions of my peers,
but I understand the human heart, perhaps better than any in my
friendclan. “Whatever happened to
Wallace, he’s a victim, too. And despite
everything, he has tried, very hard, to be kind.”) I wake briefly in the night, in the bed where Zofia ensconced
me. I glance over and see Tanjin curled
up in a chair beside me, fast asleep.
What madness could ever have made me suspect that he would turn on me? |
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