Killers, Traitors, & Runaways: Outcasts of the Worlds, Book II Read online

  *

  Despite Zella’s uncertainty, when the call came to leave, she answered without question. Nothing in her heart had been resolved, and though she had suffered nightmares since coming to Keltia, she found no need to speak up. She did not, however, dare to take her eyes off Flynn. She sat across from him, as she had on the train car, never looking away as the wagon shuddered from every pothole Poe clumsily steered them through. Flynn remained stoic, barely noticing Zella at all. He was preoccupied with Shea, who in turn was transfixed by the manor vanishing in the distance.

  When the forest broke and the wagon halted, Zella was the last to disembark. While the others exchanged their temporary farewells, she went to the front with Mr. Prim-Prim, who snorted as she patted him. He was not the first creature she’d taken under her care, but he was the first of his kind she’d ever seen and might yet be the last.

  “This way, through the brush,” Shea beckoned. “Less chance a familiar face spies me. Might take me a deserter.”

  As they traded the road for the tall grass, Zella purposefully tarried, preferring the safety that distance allowed—both from Flynn and other dangers to come. She needed only remember that her life was sacred, and that it was on them to keep her safe until she chose to end it. As an observer, she felt she should be protected from involvement, which is why Flynn’s words from their recent talk haunted her so. “It must be easy to come from better worlds and judge us for what we were all made to be.” Yet her final judgment carried considerable weight.

  In time, they returned to the main road, now a safe distance from Selif. Shea hiked up first, then gave Flynn a hand, saying, “This way,” to the rest, without offering the same assistance.

  Zella planned to trail them all the way to Belsus, and paid little attention to the others and their conversations as they walked. After an hour, the path rose and wound until she found herself on a peak, overlooking a dreary bay where the wreckage of ships was slowly drowning in the tides. How many died down there? she wondered.

  Without meaning to, she found she’d rejoined her companions, who had stopped. The road beyond was littered with splintered wagon wheels and numerous articles of junk desperately salvaged from the recent raid. Dead refugees from Belsus were piled in the ditches and scattered in the western fields. Shea ground her palm into her forehead and shuddered as though fighting to bury something painful. As Flynn studied her with clinical interest, Chari wandered to the edge and noted the drowning ships. “What intolerance provoked such an attack? Or was this reprisal for some political sleight?”

  “Cavonish came for our land. We pushed back.” Shea had regained her composure. “Nearly had us. Got inland south of here before General Kivan took back Louvian Port.”

  “Why is so much blood being spilt over land?” Zella asked in disbelief. “I have seen enough of Tryna to know there is ample space to share.”

  “Bit bloody late for that, innit?” Shea snapped.

  “It wouldn’t be easy at this stage, but if both sides could come to an understanding—”

  “What chance would there be?” Chari asked. “Butchery has wracked these land. We’ve seen it! Massacre of this order does not lend to a forgiving heart.”

  “Yet it must,” Zella insisted. “If these people have needs, help meet them! They may help you out in kind. All sides could prosper.”

  Zella could only see the corner of Shea’s mouth, but it softened just a little. Even if she did not believe in such a solution, she wanted it, and there was hope in that.

  Flynn, who had been keeping silent, posed a question. “Do they need this land?”

  “What, the Cavos?” Shea hesitated, searching for an answer. “Not sure. Were our allies ’gainst the Gorrati, could’ve taken their land if they won. Betrayed us instead. Uvench and Briss are fighting north of Cavonia, might be one side won over the other. Cavo land used to be Briss, and with the Gorrati split between Tryna and a Qalish blood feud, could have struck a deal.” She gave a smile and added, “Something I may’ve heard.”

  “Then, for many of these lands, even as one war ends, another carries on?” Chari asked.

  “That’s just our front,” Shea confirmed nonchalantly. “Qalish feuds run in every direction. Heard rumbles that New Tekevia is on a bloody rampage past them. Might get caught in that, reaches too far.”

  “Surely somewhere peace still reigns,” Zella implored. “A beacon that might serve as an example to these warring countries.”

  “Tryna was good for a time,” she replied. “Civil conflict when I was small—what did the den Viers in—but a few good years till we scrapped with the Gorra over a couple islands.”

  Zella had heard tales from Keltians before, and though all involved war, she’d had no concept of the scope before now. She worried not for the soldiers like Shea, who had been armed and trained to defend themselves, but for the victims in the middle, who would be tested with their lives. Many would cross moral lines to survive, and would no longer be the kind of people worth saving.

  Shea had drifted from the group, and was gazing at a wagon off the roadside, half-buried in the mire. In that moment, she was to Zella the face of all Trynan soldiers. “You and your enemies both have to find it in yourselves to forgive. It’s the only way this cycle ends.”

  She received no reply. Instead, Flynn spoke, his words unwelcome. “No war is won with forgiveness. Even in peaceful times, people want, and that is how they convince themselves it is their right to take. They are innocent, and innocence seeks no forgiveness.”

  And then he walked on. Shea followed, then Chari, but Zella faltered. “How easy it must be…” she murmured to herself.

  *

  Whatever riches the den Viers had hoarded had returned to the peasants. In Poe’s view, all they had sold were superfluous trinkets, whose value was only reflected in the supplies they helped acquire. He had no concept of whether they were being ripped off or not; only the results mattered. By the time the sun was setting over the now-distant forest to the west, they had gotten the supplies they needed, and he was ready to leave Selif behind.

  “We still have to find Jean,” Zaja reminded him.

  “Let us not and say we did.” Exploring this wreck of a city had made Poe ill at ease all day. Perhaps it was just restlessness; he was eager to return to the road and continue pursuing his destiny.

  “Come on, you’re not really going to abandon her?”

  “As she abandoned us?” Poe asked. Zaja looked up at him pleadingly, until finally he relented. “If you wish to pursue this, I shall postpone our departure.”

  The sights in Selif sickened Poe, who didn’t wish to remain longer than needed. He stayed in the wagon while Zaja—her hood drawn and her scarf concealing her face—bravely asked whoever she saw, soldiers and citizens alike. Most were too preoccupied to help, and she was ignored time and again.

  As he watched from the wagon, Poe saw a man weep over the body of a woman—his sister? lover?—as she was being carried away, likely to be burned with the other corpses piled up beyond the walls. Her remains were painted with dried blood and soot, and the way she’d been mangled suggested she’d been found crushed inside a collapsed house. The sight stirred Poe, who had killed so many but never had to face those his victims left behind.

  At least in Purgatory, he tried to remind himself, their ranks are ever changing. There are none that spend their entire lives there. Whatever comfort that gave him for his past kills, it did nothing for what he saw before him. The little girl that walked by with her mother had a stump for an arm, wrapped poorly in soiled bandages, and it was an injury she would grow old with. The few who had survived Poe’s wrath were similarly disfigured.

  “So there’s a shelter nearby, and one of the soldiers thinks Jean might be there,” Zaja told him as she returned to the wagon.

  Poe cracked the reins, and they started in the direction Zaja pointed. The ruined city echoed the tales of Earth that Flynn, Jean, and Mack had shared. From those stories, Poe
anticipated them taking a wrong turn and finding themselves ambushed by lawless scavengers. With his blade he could make them suffer, and there would be a self-righteous satisfaction in knowing it was deserved.

  But it was an ambush that never came. Zaja hopped out of the wagon as it slowed to a stop, and Poe reluctantly followed her inside the shelter. There were bedrolls spread throughout with little space between them.

  “Hi, have you seen a girl come through here?” Zaja asked one of the attendants. “Tall, red hair. Bad temper, worse attitude?” She was playing shy to avoid direct eye contact. “She’s my sister. We got separated coming in from Belsus.”

  “Haven’t seen anyone like that,” the attendant replied. “Check the beds if you fancy. Might be there, having a kip.”

  Zaja thanked the attendant and stepped lightly among the beds, checking the occupants who were resting and trying not to tread over those who were still awake. Poe declined to follow, but drifted in a few steps when he overheard two soldiers talking.

  “You know that bird she’s asking ’bout?”

  “What of her?”

  “Sounds like the one from Brinnegan’s last night, don’t she?”

  “Ha! Bit, yeah.”

  Poe was reluctant to paint it as more than a coincidence. Still, he moved in, listened closer.

  “Heard she made a mess after I skipped out. Wasn’t she cozying up to the 13th?”

  “Few of ’em, anyway. Started egging on the defense force, got a fight running in no time.”

  “She did that? Well, fuck her right up the arse then.”

  It certainly sounded like Jean. Poe stepped away while the two soldiers playfully jested about the things they’d like to do with Jean’s body, and went to wait for Zaja by the wagon.

  “Nothing,” she sighed as she climbed back in.

  “I might have a lead,” Poe replied. He had considered not saying anything; without Mack to keep her in check, Jean’s value was questionable at best. But he didn’t want to hide it and regret it later, and so as Zaja gave a surprised, “Really?” Poe’s only response was to crack the reigns and seek out the pub.

  *

  Chari nearly lost her footing twice. They were climbing through what remained of the walls of Belsus, whose remnants still pillared three times her height, yet no longer served to protect anything. The rubble had fallen into the closest houses and sent them to ruin in turn, the devastation continuing on for several blocks before receding enough that she no longer had to worry about twisting her ankle. It was evening and, compared to Flynn and Shea, Chari couldn’t see well in the dark. Zella’s glowing eyes bounced to and fro, but if her companion had any trouble seeing, she said nothing.

  Belsus was built high and perched above the sea, and she could hear the waves faintly crashing below. It briefly reminded Chari of home—and she’d welcome a return to Cordom were it reduced to this, with the people and faith that had tormented her driven from it.

  “Shambles,” Shea muttered. “Worse than Selif.”

  “Only now I find myself wondering,” Chari said, sharing her thoughts aloud. “Was such harm wrought when the Saryu embarked on their holy wars? Were entire ways of life destroyed in compelling others to be more like them?”

  Shea glanced at Chari oddly. “Saryu?”

  “The faith I was born into. I’ve long abandoned it.”

  “Never heard of.”

  How could you have? Chari nearly responded, but it hadn’t escaped her that Shea was engaging in willful ignorance. She had barely looked at anyone other than Flynn, and had avoided asking every obvious question from the nature of Chari’s futuristic rifle to the almost obligatory “Why is Zaja blue?” If Flynn, whom Shea still took as one of her own, wasn’t with them, would she have run at first sight? Chari was almost certain she would have.

  As it was, she guided them, and they came through the ruined streets to an inner district that had survived the bombardment. Among the nicer homes was one whose front corner had been punched through by a cannon shell, and it was here Shea led them inside. Temporarily safe from the scavengers they’d heard moving about, Chari produced the flashlight she’d been patiently concealing, and shined it around the room. While it was not the grand home that den Vier Manor had been, this house was still illustrious, the shelves adorned with fine glass carvings and the walls hung with exquisite portraiture. Looters had already come through, though it seemed they had broken far more than they stole.

  “Think it was this way,” Shea mumbled as she guided them up the staircase. Chari knew the library would not challenge the one back at the manor, but the sizable study was respectable in its own right.

  “This certainly seems more promising,” Chari said as she plucked a book from the shelf. Unlike the stuffy tomes from before, many of these sported colorful and artistic covers. Shea glanced at the book she’d taken in hand.

  “Butts Ahoy,” she read. “Collection of Maritime Eroticism.”

  Chari could feel the dismay written all over her own face, and readily filed it back on the shelf as Shea began browsing.

  “Best get started. Long walk back, can’t be caught late.”

  While Shea scoured the titles, Chari could do little more than pluck volumes at random and hope the covers might indicate their use. She was a scholar, once, but it was untenable to learn each new language they came upon. There is nothing I can contribute, she thought wearily, before she reached back and touched the rifle concealed on her back. No. Not nothing. But she didn’t feel better for remembering.

  Chari had left a life of comfort and respect because she believed the goddess whose gospel she preached was a lie. Now she knew the so-called goddess was once as human as she was, and Chari hated her all the more for serving as the face of something so self-righteous. The deification of Hapané Maraius had created the Saryu, and Chariska had shorn away her entire identity to escape them. It should have been her searching the texts for their solution, not some soldier desperately ignoring everything inconvenient about the world around her. Taryl Renivar’s soldiers would come for them again, in time, and again Chari would have to fight to the death. She had not left home to become a killer, but it was something she was beginning to see as a necessary evil.

  Over an hour passed, the dragging of time made worse by how the Keltians measured it. Each hour was a hundred minutes long, and the minutes themselves stretched longer than Chari liked. She found herself staring at the clock often, feeling like it was barely moving, all the while waiting and hoping someone would find something.

  “Might’ve found it,” Shea announced as she brought over a tome and laid it on the desk. “Land of Thoris is a place of profound mystery, even in this modern era,” Shea read, her index finger following the text. “Owing to the looming height of its outer walls, it is visible from numerous points ‘long the northern coast. Farthest point from which it can still be seen is the Iklea Valley, whose tribes once believed it to be the place where the sun, moons, and stars all went to rest. Closest point is the Atvuon Peninsula, whose modern inhabitants still hand down tales of the gods coming to and fro as wafts of light. It is likely that—goes on a bit here…” She skimmed through the remaining text. “Short of it, Thoris is hard to reach—and the mystery of this land coupled with the superstitious nature of the primitive mind is likely the root of these tales, lending to its nickname as the Garden of the Gods.”

  Shea looked to the others, awaiting their approval.

  “Then it’s something of a ‘Mount Olympus’?” Flynn asked.

  “An analogy which I’m certain is quite valid to any who knows its meaning,” Chari replied.

  Shea cracked a smile at Flynn and added, “Aye. Lost me there, mate.”

  “And there is nothing in the book concerning successful modern expeditions?” Zella asked.

  “Ah…” Shea stalled as she flipped through the pages. “Was a Lieutenant Mace. Tried to blast in the southeast side. No luck there.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s e
nough to go on,” Flynn said as he shook his head. “Even as far away as we are, if there were something strong enough there to support this story, I’d have felt it.”

  “Perhaps you overestimate your senses,” Zella said coldly.

  “Perhaps I do.”

  “It may be insulated in some way we do not understand,” Zella went on. “Just as Airia Rousow had hidden the great power she once wielded, so too might this land have protections beyond our knowing.”

  As Chari thought back to their journey, something about Thoris felt familiar to her. The phrase “Garden of the Gods” stayed with her, until at last she remembered the sanctuary where they’d first met Airia. There were signs that it had once hosted a garden. Perhaps Thoris was the same.

  “I think we may need to see it to find out,” she said.

  “Daft plan. Know that, right?” Shea asked. “No one’s ever got in.”

  “They’re not us,” Flynn replied without the slightest hesitation. “What’re you thinking, Chari?”

  “Our pursuit has been for a path correct and true, while knowing nothing of its nature or location. Perhaps what we need is not one path, but many, brought together in one place.”

  “A juncture,” he caught on. “Like Airia’s sanctuary.”

  “Thoris may be perfect for this,” she replied. “If the tales hold any truth at all, it may be such a place, or at least one that saw Mystiks come and go from time to time.”

  Finding even this small solution provided Chari more satisfaction than she had anticipated. They had only hours before Shea would take her leave of them; she intended to learn everything she could.

  *

  Brinnegan’s pub was crowded and raucous, as the soldiers who cluttered the tables made one last night of it before they sailed off come dawn. If Jean had been here, she hadn’t bothered coming back, but that wasn’t enough to deter Zaja DeSarah. She pushed through to the bar and wedged in between two patrons to find the bartender, trying to keep her face out of sight while getting his attention.