Wanderers of the Silent Season (Heartbeat of the World Book 2) Page 31

  “Let . . . ” He reached out to her hand and touched her fingertips, to which she quickly recoiled. “No, not yet.” He winced as he planted his feet, dropping the pack to his knees.

  “Will you?” the girl asked, but Kechua gave a trembling wave.

  “Won’t leave without . . . ” The ragged memories infected the bones of his pack as he sorted through. “Helped me,” he sputtered, nodding frantically. “You said . . . ” The chorus smacked him again, but he redoubled the effort in his neck, sneering in effort. “Music and seed.”

  “In trade, yes. Well, not so much music, but . . . ” The boy shared the girl’s desperation.

  Kechua fought the words. “Need an offering, don’t want trouble for you . . . for me.” He slipped his pack down and produced the bag of berries, taking a scrap of bloodied cloth from his discarded pants and tying a handful of them in it. “Promise you will plant them.”

  “I . . . we will.” The boy took the bloodied package. “What are—”

  “Music, you said music.” Kechua glanced at the girl.

  “Y-yes, but if it’s on a player or a phone, we’ll need to make sure it’s something we don’t have, and then . . . ”

  “You . . . ” Kechua couldn’t stifle a laugh, and in that moment, the grinding and screaming ebbed into clarity. “You haven’t heard this.” He slipped the CD out of his pack. “I hope you can work with CDs.”

  “23 Fly? Is . . . is that your band?” She glanced at his shirt.

  “No. Well, in a sense, but it’s not my music.” He chuckled. “Just make sure someone listens to it. That’s what has to be done with that.”

  “I . . . we will.” The girl nodded fiercely.

  “But . . . wait, your meal, your payment, it’s not fair . . . ” The girl stopped him again, tapping his shoulder.

  “Not fair,” the boy agreed, also gently placing a hand on Kechua’s shoulder.

  “A man named Rutger. Has a carved staff. Taller than me. Watch out for him, listen for word of him. He is coming.” He slipped out of their grips and thrust the glass door open. “I’ll be back tomorrow. We can settle the meal and the rest tomorrow.” He slipped onto the sands and the yawning grip immediately left his ankles. He took a long savoring breath of the chill night air. “I can’t stand in there. Need to run. Need to breathe.”

  The pair closed the door behind him, their faces bewildered and sad, but nodding slowly at the change in his stance. He leapt into the darkness and his feet flew free. He cut through the shivering forms of corn, feeling the embrace of leaves against his skin.

  A single figure met him at his side, a hissing gallop of four padded feet.

  “That you, Old Man?” Kechua laughed, and a simple growl was his only response. The darkness yawned around them, the catch of the corn leaving just as the lingering scream of the school parted from his brain. Rage boiled in his stomach, the feeling of failure, and he ran against the darkness with his clubs out like wings, only the rhythm of his feet against the soil to guide him in the dark.

  Joy rose in his chest as shimmering shapes of black on black ran beside him, not yet closing in; not quite sure what to make of him. Some nipped at his feet, crossing the line of his path, and they slowly gathered numbers, gravity attracting more.

  He flowed through the night, losing himself in his flight. He ran through blackness, tearing the sand up as he went, sensing an ever-growing heat of eyes upon his back. A strand of sleeping trees broke his trance, and he skidded to stop. The sea of pinprick red swallowed the light around him, but he managed to steal a glance back to confirm the light of the school was entirely gone.

  He shed his pack with the last of his momentum and leapt toward the lunge of the first of the shadowy dogs, meeting its yawning jaw and slicing it down the middle. It erupted in shimmering silver paint that splattered on the ground, a new glowing circle of light serving to illuminate the surrounding beasts.

  “I would draw your circle now,” Wolf muttered, a pair of eyes rising ignored above the relatively demure line of red.

  “No circles tonight.” Kechua clacked and bore his teeth, swaying in place, meeting every eye that dared approach. “Come! One or all, come with all your force and hate and fang!” he roared at the circle. They paused and snarled, but they did not withdraw in the least.

  “Oh ho.” Wolf laughed and leapt into the circle beside Kechua. A pairing of darkened shapes took this as a trigger, and Kechua met them both with ending strikes, letting his arms wake and his mind shrug off the ugly feeling.

  To his surprise, Wolf met one of them who had come behind Kechua, shaking the thing like a ragdoll until its form shattered and painting splotches of silver against the trees around.

  Three came at Kechua, and he caught two with dispatching hits to their skulls and sides, but the third one latched onto the small of his arm. The red of its eyes steamed and flickered as the silver around them shivered into a fine mist. Kechua struck the beast’s skull repeatedly with the smaller of the clubs, but he managed only to send it back to the pack’s wall.

  The blood let out, the taboo vanished with a blink, and the glimmering silver was swallowed into darkness. Kechua met the tide with blade and club, parting it in tiny silver trickles as the teeth and claw overwhelmed his body.

  CHAPTER 12:

  The Elders

  He woke with a gasp and the end to the laugh that had been swallowed in the night. Blue sky shone above, but for the first time, he saw clouds above in his blurred waking eyes.

  He sat easily enough, naked save for a few remaining scraps of cloth, but his hands still firmly gripped his clubs. The skeletal trees around them looked as if they had been selectively enveloped with ice, splashed against them, sometimes going so far as to impale the trees. It was these pillars of ice he had mistaken for clouds, as the entire area was decorated with a spherical tangle of crystalline white.

  “So, who won?” Kechua chuckled, his limbs feeling rather energized and alive. “Are you alive, Old Man?” he called out, dressing in his final pair of pants and one of his remaining shirts. “Stupid, should’ve just stripped at the school.” Though the idea of doing that in front of the two guards tickled him and squashed his regret. The cloth was a price paid.

  He tucked away the rags into their growing presence in his pack and dressed himself again, taking the time to gaze around the sphere as he fastened the ankles of his pants with the leather. A cluttering of black shapes glared down at him, bobbing heads pivoting in place with a jittery and curious fixation. It was hard to discern any form in them, but they bore beaks upon their faces and feathers of some kind.

  “Oh, are you going to try too?” He chuckled.

  “I would not provoke them. They will not be banished by dawn.” The laughing growl came from beyond the sphere’s edge. “They already suspect you are something of interest from this little display.”

  Kechua sipped his water and found the pouch significantly shriveled. “Should’ve asked for water.” He sighed, trying to look back to the school, but not being quite sure where it would have been.

  He noticed the two figures inside the sphere with him, a pair of cloaked humans, both draped in the same roan red the contemplative old man had worn.

  “Hello?” He crept towards them, his pack in the sands and his clubs sleeping at his sides, ready. The hoods of their cloaks shrouded their faces in shadow. Both looked as he approached, burning red eyes piercing the darkness and into him before looking down. They moved with labored stiffness reminding him of Anah’s grandmother, and in that moment, the figures shuddered slightly and the glowing red dissipated.

  The pair glanced between one another, hoods trembling as they whispered. Wisped white hair flowed out from both the hoods, one set into braids and interwoven with red thread, the other much wispier but sporting a slim beard in compensation.

  “He does not run from us, Grandfather,” a woman’s voice croaked dryly.

  “Indeed not.” A man’s voice chuckled in agreement.


  Yellow-clawed nails, upon red spotted and veiny hands, opened the hoods, revealing the faces of the pair. Their eyes bore halos of red around a mixture of the eyes Kechua had projected upon them and foggy cataracts. Their faces both freckled intensely with reddened constellations of spots, and their skin shone like cured and loose leather.

  “Hello, young one, you make remarkable art,” the woman said. Her eyes squinted gently at him, giving a scoping look around them.

  “You aren’t the dogs, are you? Or the birds?” Kechua asked, not quite able to trust their forms.

  “We are as you see us, no more and no less. Only two, and simply two,” the old man said, giving a gentle bow. “We have been watching that dead place you came from; felt the power of your display being shaped. We watched over you as the pack dissolved and the morning came.”

  “Who is your friend?” The woman traced something beyond the outside of the glassy cage.

  “Oh, that’s Wolf.” Kechua saw the beast’s form pacing outside the circle, the holes in the crystal sphere too narrow for him to pass through. “I am Kechua,” he added, staring back at the two figures. He joined them in a sit, keeping some distance.

  “A wolf, yes. The word I can feel in my knowing, yet not quite right for him.” The woman cocked her head slightly and gazed at her partner. “I am . . . Grandmother, and he is Grandfather.” She smiled. “We are newer than the faded moon, and yet we feel the ages upon our skin, into our bones. We were born but two weeks ago now, in our recollections, yet we are as you see us. We know much, we know you and of your people, yet we have forgot even more and remember nothing of ourselves. We are lost, and we wander.”

  “You will not attack then?” Kechua asked.

  “What could we do?” The man laughed heartily. “We pursue no game, not as we are.”

  “When we were born, perhaps we would have reached for you, not knowing any better. We know hunger and thirst, and still it grinds inside. But when we were born, facing one who felt so much like you, another stood between us, spoke to us, shaped us with her will and speech,” Grandmother pondered.

  “The one linked to us was helpless,” said the man. “She explained that it could not understand the game or the struggle. She tamed us with her words, her sincerity. She was one of your people, I think, though removed by generations and land.”

  “Was her name . . . ” Kechua’s mind raced. Was Mana somehow there? Had they spoken to her?

  “Narah.” The man nodded. “A creature named Otaka stood near her and translated her words until we could understand her ourselves.”

  “She told us that we are of you in a way, a monument to those before. She is the one who spoke our names to us,” she said, echoing the words. Her hand fell upon his shoulder, and Kechua realized he had shifted towards them slowly. Her hand sat so warm upon his shoulder, but that only twisted the feeling. He wanted to be back in Mana’s clinic. He would take all the shots. He wanted to be struck by the scolding shaman again, to clear his filth away and take him his cheese. He wanted all of it, all the familiar pain—each day ended in comfort; each day seeing Anah.

  “I have some food. Will it help?” Kechua slipped back and brought his pack before the two.

  The man shook his head at the berries and meat, giving a dismissing wave. “The hunger and thirst aches so, but there is only one thing to sate us.” Grandfather sighed, turning away the offering. Grandmother gave a slow nod towards Kechua. “And that thing is what we must never have. We carry on, though we are both tired. We still wish to exist, still wish to see what we can with our remaining time.” The man smiled.

  “Please, is there anything I can do to help you, then?” Kechua asked, looking between the two faces.

  “Your art here is quite exquisite and gives us both joy.” Grandmother smiled softly. “There is nothing that you can do for us in the way you ask.” Her smile fell.

  Grandmother regarded him with a silent knowing, growing by the second. The red light of malevolence pierced the guise of red eyes. Her expression flickered into that of a hungering and seething face before flickering back to her kindly mask.

  “Forgive me, young one,” she muttered, her head lowering in shame. “We should not stay long.”

  Kechua felt a glimmer of shame, realizing his hand had moved towards his larger club in anticipation of some blindsided attack. He shifted it away, shriveled and shamed. “Then . . . then take it. It will help, right? It will ease the pain you feel?”

  The man’s face flickered with malevolence and red, his mouth lifting on one side to reveal a set of shattered yellow fangs before fading. “Please, do not offer.” He bowed gently.

  “We would change, you see. Narah explained this well. We would be sated and empowered, but our hunger would grow with the new dawn.” Grandfather smiled. There was a strange creeping sound, so vague and faint it was almost inaudible, but it was there. “I think, though, that even your willingness to give us that tribute, your kindness and respect, has given us strength.”

  “We must go,” Grandmother insisted, her cloak pulled low over her face. Grandfather rose with her, and they both struggled to stand, slowly gripping a tree to rise to their feet. A bed of red tinged moss had grown beneath where they sat.

  “No.” Grandfather shooed Kechua’s offered hand away. “It is hard, even your touch would now set us loose.” His voice lowered to a miserable tremble. “We must go.”

  “Could I ask something before you go?” Kechua raised an arm towards them, clawing at the air in desperation. “This doesn’t feel like coincidence. You feel like home. Before you leave, give me something, a request; an order. Anything. It may not seem like it’s a gift for me, but it is. A clear, simple thing you want me to do.”

  Four red eyes looked with a bewildered sadness at him. They wanted to have words with him, to tell him things, to assure him of things, but the flickering red hunger upon their faces strobed more as they lingered. It was not the time, and they knew this.

  “The stars,” Grandmother replied. “I know of them, and they sing and call to me every night with their absence. I would like to see them, feel them again, before our time has ended.”

  “Yes.” Grandfather looked at the sky, pitch black and empty. “To spend one night under the canopy of the heavens . . . ” He trailed off. “We came across another of our kind, of gnawing dark, and we believe . . . ”

  “We know,” Grandmother corrected.

  “That it is what blanks the stars from our sight. We can feel it even now, lurking in shadows all over the sands, but we know of where you can find it while the sun still shines, where you can call it out.”

  “I will do this.” Kechua bowed. “It will be my honor.”

  CHAPTER 13:

  The Terror of Night

  His goal was a house, somewhere east along the trodden paths leading from the school. They had, at least, oriented him back towards the school, and he had given it a wide enough berth that it only passed as a single-gemmed cylinder poking above the horizon before it withered down again.

  He tried to maintain the orientation, heading directly east, and stopped when he crossed two beaten down paths. He would try to ensure the straightness of his path, eyeing the way he had come while gnawing some fruit each time to renew himself, but the angles they flowed in made him unsure of how far his path had warped. Though he never encountered another human, he could trace their steps in the quiet traffic upon the paths. None sang of recent trespassers, but the patter of feet upon the sands gave him comfort.

  He saw no trace of the river and no signposts of any kind as he travelled between the veins. In the end, his goal arrived, at first a rutted path flowing into his steps. It was shortly joined by the skeletal ruins of buildings, which cooled his side with their shadows.

  He slowed to a deliberate march, but the goal seemed rather clear, as it was the only house standing tall and proud on the ghostly street. Just as described, the gate slowly swung upon its hinges. He felt a fading memory of recent people
going in and out daily, out with daylight and in well before nightfall, and yet the freshest and final path rang true enough he could follow it.

  He leaned against the door, testing the innards for any recent life, but found it silent within the shallower layers of the day. He found the door to be unlocked, but with something immediately barricading against it. After a few nudges, he surrendered for the moment and circled around the house.

  A cellar yawned open, a pair of flap doors forming the petals of a stark black void for a bloom. A lonely set of tiny footprints led outwards, the guiding rhythm quick but deliberate. The quietest little tapping of something followed, the holes almost invisible to his eyes.

  The song of retreat, of those footsteps tapping into the sand, hummed light and faraway, almost lost against the beaten song of the memory of the house. He tested the dark of the cellar, and his hand immediately chilled when submerged inside.

  He hovered there on top of the stairs, his head burning from sweat and sun. The dark shuffled and hissed, an inky pond with tiny ripples lapping at the top of the stairs. It was enough to drive him away and to the rear of the house.

  The yard lay entirely brown and bare, guarded by the white fence save for a single dark splotch on the far end. Upon investigation, Kechua was relieved to find a pool of silty, but still fresh, water waiting for him. He drank, replacing the grit of the berries for the clinging touch of the fine clay on his teeth, and splashed water to chill his head. Though his water skin withered to near nothing, he felt loathe to mix the river’s water with the grime of the pond. He instead completed his circuit around the house, arriving at the front door again with no great revelation unveiled.

  He sighed and reached to the frame of the door, trying to push his perception deep inside. Not a single footstep had graced the wood for days, and only a trail of frantic stomping cascaded towards the basement. The memory of doors slamming, of screaming fights, varnished the wood. Frustrated tears and soft soothing words hung in the rugs like smoke.