SOUTHWEST
Saturday, August 1, 999 AE
Malachi Thorne squinted into the broiling white anger of the sun, set against a multihued blue sky devoid of clouds.
“Last chance, Thorne,” the man below him said. “You come peaceful, I let you live. If not, I kill you.”
Thorne turned his head and looked down. He was more than ten feet off the ground. The muscular arms of Thorne’s captor held aloft his six-foot-three frame as easily as a normal man might raise a shovel over his head. Massive hands supported his shoulders and lower spine. He felt like a turtle flipped on its back.
“Piss off,” he grunted through bloody lips.
The man below him snorted and lumbered forward to build momentum. With a snarl of exertion, he hurled Thorne through the air. He collided with the weak and ruined wall of what had once been a small house. As Thorne crashed through it, he carried termite-riddled timber, dust and plaster chips with him. What remained of the wall creaked and shuddered.
The giant appeared in what was left of the doorway.
The wall groaned again. Bits of the ceiling rained down. The remnants of the wall swayed with a deep grinding noise and crashed down on Thorne. The ceiling shed more wood and plaster before caving in. Thorne lay beneath the pile of debris, coughing dust from his lungs.
The giant wiped sweat from his face. At least seven feet tall with shoulders the length of a barrel, his arms were still too long for his body, giving him a simian aspect. He wore dark breeches and sandals but no shirt, only a leather vest. Coarse, wiry hair covered him. It curled on his arms, sprouted from his chest, carpeted his shoulders. The majority of his face lay buried beneath wild, uncut hair and a beard the size of a badger. He carried a coil of rope.
Thorne groaned. Every part of him ached.
“Let’s go, Witchfinder. Up,” the man said. He waited with arms crossed.
Thorne pushed aside the rotted timbers and detritus and wiped dirt from his eyes. He sat up. His long black hair hung in sweaty strands around his shoulders. He wiped blood and dust from his mustache and goatee. Minor cuts oozed blood, and bruises darkened on his arms. His tunic was ripped in several places, as were his breeches. Sitting amid the debris, he looked like a pauper after a windstorm.
“Who are you?” Thorne asked as he spat blood.
“They call me Mathan the Bear. Claiming the bounty on you,” the giant rumbled beneath a mustache two fingers wide.
“What?” Thorne shook his head and sent fragments of wood flying from his hair. “Bounty? What bounty?”
Mathan had not moved. He stood several feet away, eyeing his prey with caution. “Five hundred silver coins for you alive. Two hundred and fifty for you dead.”
Thorne glanced around. What remained of the room was empty except for the debris in which he sat. His fingers felt around under the pile for anything he could use as a weapon. They found the handle of his dagger, which had been knocked out of his boot when he went through the wall.
He let his head and shoulders droop. Through the strands of his hair, he saw Mathan uncoiling the rope. “Who issued the bounty?” He tried to make his voice sound weak. It was not difficult.
“Witchfinder Imperator Zadicus Rann.”
Thorne sneered. His cheeks flushed with rage. It was an instinctual reaction when he heard that name. He gripped the dagger beneath the debris.
“Stand up. Slowly,” Mathan commanded.
Thorne struggled to his knees, then to his feet. He kept his right hand at his side, the dagger pointed away from the bounty hunter. Rann’s smug face swam before his eyes. One way or another, he was going to kill Rann. Not because of the bounty—although that infuriated him as well—but because of what had happened to his mentor, Valerian Merrick.
A month and a half ago, Thorne had watched, helpless, as Zadicus Rann disemboweled Merrick. He had done it merely to torment Thorne. Rann had almost succeeded in executing Thorne and his friends, but they had been rescued by Teska Vaun and other members of the witch cult, the Enodia Communion.
Mathan stepped forward. “Don’t move. I can break your spine with one punch.”
Thorne crouched like a whipped dog.
“Hands behind your—”
Thorne dove into a forward roll and came up in a crouch beside the giant. Mathan stopped, surprised at the unexpected move.
Thorne sliced the giant’s left leg just behind the ankle. The dagger slipped through the flesh and severed the tendon. Mathan’s bellow of pain came with the blood.
The bounty hunter swung at Thorne, but he rolled out of range.
The Bear tried to pivot, forgetting his left foot was useless. Blood pooled in the dirt and dust. He almost collapsed as he fumbled his own dagger free.
Thorne advanced on him from behind. Raising his foot, he smashed his heel down onto the exposed tendon. Mathan screamed like all the souls in all Twelve Hells. He toppled forward. Only a wall prevented him from falling to the floor. Tears streamed down his pale cheeks. He tried to speak, but the words dissolved in another bellow of pain. He braced himself against the wall and brandished his dagger.
“I’m just…the first of many.” His features twisted with hate. “Your days are numbered, Witchfinder.” With a ferocious war cry, he lunged at his opponent.
Thorne guessed that the Bear intended to gut him or at least pin him to the floor.
Mathan did not get the chance to do either.
Thorne leapt forward and wrapped his arms around Mathan’s right leg. Once again, Thorne’s blade sliced through sandal, flesh and tendon.
Even with Thorne around his leg, the giant’s momentum carried them outside. Mathan hit the brittle yellow grass like a crippled horse. He screamed in agony, and his writhing kicked up clouds of dust.
Thorne rolled away and paused to catch his breath.
“Oh shit, oh fuck,” Mathan said, gasping. “Damn you to hells! Oh shit, oh shit.” He managed to sit up and stared at his feet. They lay at odd angles against his legs.
“How many more?” Thorne asked. He stood over the bounty hunter but well out of range of those apelike arms.
“Wh-What?” Mathan glared at Thorne through narrow, watery eyes. “Fuck you!”
“How many more bounty hunters?” Thorne knelt at Mathan’s feet. Their eyes locked.
“How. Many.” He grabbed a foot and twisted. “More?”
Mathan’s shriek startled a nest of birds in a nearby cottonwood tree. Sweat stood out on his pallid cheeks. His breath came in hitching gasps.
“T-T-Two. Maybe th-three.” His head rolled to one side, and he fell back on the ground.
After several minutes—and making sure that the Bear was unconscious—Thorne knelt beside the body. He thought about Rann and the bounty. The fury built within him once more. One day soon, his nemesis would pay for everything he had done. Picturing Rann’s smug face, Thorne slit Mathan’s throat. He wiped the dagger on the bounty hunter’s vest. Being killed while unconscious was a better death than the one he would have been dealt by the Bear.
Thorne stood on weak legs and looked around, suddenly aware of how exposed he felt. The ramshackle houses—mostly just crumbling walls and desiccated wood—stood in rows along the street. A su-burb, the place had once been called. Now it was just the decaying evidence of a long-lost world. Thorne retrieved his sword from where Mathan had clubbed it from his grip.
He walked down the street, sword in hand. Weeds and saplings reached through the ash-colored hardtop. He kept to the center, scanning both sides of the street for any sign of movement.
He had wandered into this su-burb by accident. He had been walking and thinking when Mathan jumped him. Thorne cursed himself again for his lack of vigilance. It had nearly cost him his life. He was lucky. But you could not survive in this strange land by luck alone. He knew he needed to reclaim the attentiveness and discipline that had made him a feared Witchfinder Imperator. That seemed like a lifetime ago. But it had only been two months.
##
Malachi Thorne, Teska Vaun and Thurl Cabbott had left the village of Saintgen, south of Last Chapel, the day after they had buried Valerian Merrick. They traveled south along the Black River. To the west lurked the Devouring Lands, a waste teeming with mystery and death. No one knew how big the Devouring Lands were, just as Thorne had no idea what route to take to get to the land of the Tex’ahns.
Thorne intended to visit the Tex’ahns and learn more about the concept of freedom—an idea that Merrick had paid for with his life. If he was to take up Merrick’s mantle, he felt he could only do so by spending time among the people who had influenced his mentor.
Teska came with him, not only because their relationship kept them together, but because she had a special task of her own. The Enodia Communion had sent her west to discover and train more Nahoru’brexia—a new kind of witch with unique abilities. However, she knew from Maiden Mallumo, the Witch of Darkness, that this quest had not been well received by many of the older members of the Communion. They resented the younger ones with their individual supernatural gifts. No one knew where these manifestations came from, although many speculated they originated with Hecate herself. Why the younger witches had these abilities, while the older ones did not, was cause for simmering animosity and jealousy.
Cabbott came along for their protection, not to mention his life was just as forfeit in their homeland of Deiparia as Thorne and Teska’s.
They had followed the river until it emptied into the Arkan Sea just north of Baymouth. Turning southwest, they skirted the edge of the Devouring Lands. The terrain varied little from that of their homeland. They climbed hills and crossed meadows and vast fields that once likely produced fine crops but were now shaggy with trees and undergrowth. They navigated through forests of ancient spruce, pine, post oak and mimosa with their pale pink blossoms. Everywhere, they saw the remains of the world that used to be.
Ruined, skeletal dwellings and buildings—once part of the pre-Cataclysm world—were everywhere. Walls lay where they had fallen centuries ago, blanketed with kuzda vines, the invasive but useful plant that seemed all but indestructible. The pale gray roads—buckled, crumbling and overtaken by weeds—often contained the wasted metallic shells of peculiar conveyances. None of the three had ever seen anything like them. They appeared to have had four spots to attach wheels, but there was no place to hook a team of horses. Doors often stood open, showing rotted benches within. On the front, beneath a flat square sheet of metal, sat a mechanical contraption of blocks and pipes that defied explanation.
They had occasional encounters with wild dogs—but mercifully no hellhounds—and saw countless human skeletons along the roads and inside the buildings. Game was plentiful, and they often had squirrel, rabbit and deer. Water, too, was luckily not an issue, but the wicked summer heat of Deiparia, smothering and relentless, ruled these lands.
At night, they had talked of Merrick’s crusade for freedom and what Malachi hoped to find and learn in the Tex’ahn lands. They spoke of the Church of the Deiparous and the emergence of the Fifth Order, as well as the invisible God that Merrick claimed the Tex’ahn’s followed. They had kept watch each night, unsure of what dangers lurked around them. Yet they had encountered no other living humans since leaving the shoreline of the Arkan Sea. They were cognizant that each day took them farther beyond the boundaries of Deiparia, deeper into the unknown.
Malachi and Teska’s relationship grew over the weeks they traveled together. Teska had feared that Thorne would turn out to be like all her other lovers, abusing her for personal gain. But he was considerate and kind in a way she could never have imagined when he was a Witchfinder Imperator. It was as if his excommunication had released him from unseen burdens, like a beetle leaving behind the husk of its old self. A whole new man was emerging before her eyes.
But their affection for one another did not blind them to the changes in Thurl Cabbott. Once Thorne’s constable and trusted friend, the sixty year old had grown quiet and withdrawn. He slept little, often sitting watch the whole night so that Thorne and Teska could rest. Thurl no longer joked with Malachi like he once did, and on occasion they had caught him staring at them with a peculiar gleam in his eyes. When they asked him about these things, he shook his head, saying his near-death experience in Last Chapel had affected him more deeply than he first thought.
##
“Concentrate,” Teska Vaun said to the young woman across the table from her.
Amelia Sloan closed her eyes and wrinkled her petite nose.
“Repeat the phrase.”
“Sestre Tuga, venas sercanta vin’ahd,
Motika pagnanha malaman’ahd,
Matronis, Matka, Maag’deh, venas sercanta vin’ahd.”
“Nice,” Teska whispered. “Keep at it. You’ve got the hang of it.” She stood, stretched and walked to the window. She eased open one of the shutters and looked out at nothing.
Amelia’s simple three-room house hunched in the middle of a dusty plain, in an area that had once been called Richland Hills, although Teska could not understand why. There were no hills to be seen. Anywhere. The land was as flat as a sword blade, the horizon broken only by a few buildings that refused to collapse. The cabin was a half-day’s ride west of Dallastown, and the closest village was a windswept speck called Hirst seven miles away in a sea of prairie grass. Besides a barn and the fallow fields nearby, the hardscrabble ground receded into the hint of mountain ridges far to the west.
Teska was frustrated. After three weeks, Amelia was the only witch she had found. She turned around, leaned against the wall and watched the woman.
Amelia Sloan was twenty-five—three years older than Teska—and a few inches taller but thinner in the shoulders. Freckles dotted the bridge of her nose, cheeks and forearms. She wore her blonde hair loose down her back, the sides swept behind her head and tied in place. She wore a simple blue dress and dusty black button-up shoes. She continued to intone the invitation, her voice like gossamer.
Teska waited another minute. “Anything?”
Amelia opened her eyes—azure irises flecked with teal—and slowly shook her head. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong person?”
“Nah,” Teska said. “You’re Nahoru’brexia.”
“What’s that mean again?” Her voice had a pleasant drawl.
Teska returned to her chair. “It means that you and I—and others like us—are a special breed of brexia. Witches. The Three-Who-Are-One believe we are the future of the Enodia Communion.”
“But why me?”
Teska shrugged. “Hells, why any of us? Who knows? It’s just something we’re born with. I’ve told you about my gift. Every Nahoru’brexia has one. Yours, you say—”
“I can see in the dark. Just like it was daytime.” She smiled, and her face lit up.
Teska knew how good it felt to be able to tell someone who understood. She saw the relief on Amelia’s face.
Amelia leaned forward, elbows on the table. “So if I’m Nahoru’brexia, why can’t I, you know, contact them?” She whispered the last word and glanced around the room.
“It takes time,” Teska said with more confidence than she felt. She was still new to all of this, too. She had only learned about the Nahoru’brexia a little over a month ago. And then her education had been interrupted when the Fifth Order took Last Chapel. She felt as if she knew as little about all of it as she did about bricklaying. Yet here she was in the middle of nowhere, trying to convince this woman she was qualified to teach her.
How did I get myself into this shit?
But she knew all too well. She just did not want to think about it. Even after all this time, she could still smell the musky stench of the serpents that had cocooned and constricted her at the Maiden’s command.
“Would you like something to drink?” Amelia asked as she stood up.
Teska nodded. Her curly red hair bounced. “Yeah, that’d be good.”
Amelia walked to the other side of the room that served as the kitchen. “I have water, of course. I can make some tea. I’m afraid I don’t have any alcohol.”
“Tea’s good.”
While Amelia worked, Teska looked around the room. The cabin had a high ceiling with a loft over the bedroom. There was only one door inside, which led to the bedroom. Three windows, two at the front and one near the fireplace in the back, were shuttered against the heat and blowing dust. Everything smelled of pine, wood smoke and dried meat.
“So you say you and your husband settled here,” Teska said.
“That’s right. Alec believed he could farm this land. He was determined.” She stopped for a moment and looked through the back window. “He had it in his head that he was going to grow wheat and cotton here. He tried, sure enough. But it wasn’t meant to be. Soil’s too bad.”
“How long you been here?”
Her voice was softer and despondent. “Alec built us this house two years ago. We moved out here then.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, what happened to him?” Teska had an idea. She had been around enough men to know how often they ran out.
“He passed away. At the end of April.”
That was not what Teska had expected. Her apology sounded thin even to her own ears.
Amelia offered a wistful smile. “Thank you.”
“How long were you married?”
“Five years.”
For a moment neither spoke. Amelia continued to make tea.
“I, uh—I’ve had some shitty luck with men. Never have found what you found.”
Now it was Amelia’s turn to apologize.
Teska brushed it aside. “It’s all right. There’s a guy now…”
Amelia turned around with two wooden cups in hand. “What’s he like?” she asked, expectation in her voice. She sat a cup on the table in front of Teska and took a drink from her own. Her eyes shone with excitement.
“He’s, ah… Well, we’ve only been together for a little while.”
“Do you love him?” Amelia asked over the rim of her cup.
Teska smiled, the dimples in her cheeks deepening. She blushed. “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Amelia had not stopped smiling. “And does he feel the same about you?”
Teska nodded, her blush intensifying.
“How wonderful for you!” Amelia took another drink and set the cup down, her blue eyes reflecting the light. “Teska, you enjoy every moment. Cherish every little thing. Because it’s the little things that matter most. If you love him and he loves you, don’t you let nothing keep the two of you apart.”
Teska raised her cup and took a drink. The tea was sweet and cold.
She was still getting used to this Tex’ahn beverage called sweet tea. When they first arrived in this barren and windswept land, they had been given cups of the stuff. After her first sip, Teska had spit it back in the cup. “This shit’s cold as a well digger’s ass,” she had exclaimed. Their hosts had been perplexed. Thorne, Teska and Cabbott had explained that they were accustomed to hot tea and did not have sweet tea back in Deiparia.
The Tex’ahns made it from kuzda leaves since there was plenty of it to go around, and they drank it all the time. They made it by pouring hot water into a pitcher of cold water with sugar and stirring it together. Teska had asked why the hot water was needed. Why not just put the sugar in the cold water? “Because a cup of cold water with grit floatin’ in the bottom ain’t sweet tea,” she had been told. “You taste the sugar. You don’t see it.” The tea had the slightly bitter aftertaste that was common with kuzda leaves, but Teska had to admit it was refreshing in this scorching, humid climate.
“Sweet tea’s a staple around here,” Amelia said. “It’s been around forever. Our history-tellers say it goes back way before Judgment Day.”
Teska frowned. “Judgment Day?”
“When God judged the Earth.”
Teska shook her head.
“The moon falling. All the natural disasters. The radiation.”
Merrick had told them about the radiation. Before he was murdered.
“Oh, you mean the Great Cataclysm.”
“Is that what your people call it?” Amelia asked.
Teska nodded and pushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “Why’d you say that God judged the earth?”
Amelia refilled their cups and told her the story.
##
Thurl Cabbott was losing his mind. He could think of no other explanation.
He sat outside the livery on a wooden boardwalk that ran along the front of the main buildings in Dallastown. People passed by on errands of one sort or another. The street, still identified as Shady Grove by a twisted and faded sign at one intersection, served as Dallastown’s main thoroughfare. The original city a few miles east had been all but obliterated by a lunar fragment during the Great Cataclysm. A crater marked the spot, and nothing grew within a half mile of it. The soil was a putrid greenish gray and no one ventured there.
Cabbott stared at a man leading a horse down the street, a rickety wagon squeaking along behind. The longer he stared, the clearer he could see. It felt like staring through a tunnel.
His vision had been like this since Last Chapel. Sometimes he could see well; other times, like now, he had to concentrate and focus in order to make out details. It was as if he were seeing through someone else’s eyes that he couldn’t control.
Losing my mind, he thought.
That must also be the reason he had memories that were not his own. At least he assumed they were memories. In his mind’s eye, they were never clear, like trying to see through fog. For weeks, he had been unable to identify a single thing in any of them. Recently there seemed to be more of them.
On top of that, he had gaps of missing time he could not account for. It happened most often during the day. He was unable to remember where he had been or what he was doing. He was grateful that Thorne and Teska did not seem to notice. He said nothing about it, of course. He did not want them to think that he was insane.
The elderly often lost their grip on reality—talking to loved ones who were no longer there, seeing things that no one else could see, forgetting simple things. Was that what was happening to him? Was he becoming old and senile? He sometimes wondered if maybe it would have been better if he had died in Last Chapel. Because he did not like whatever was going on.
His body felt heavy. He needed to sleep. That happened more frequently now, too. Not wanting to fight it, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Immediately the darkness enfolded him.
Thurl Cabbott sat on the boardwalk, watching people come and go with keen interest and a peculiar glint in his eyes.
