Ted Dekker - Mortal

It was the reason returning Keenan to the outpost had been so difficult. For the first time her loyalties had been thrown into direct conflict. It had torn at her to do it, having seen the look on Jonathan’s face, the way he had bent down to talk to the boy before reluctantly letting him go. But she didn’t resent Rom. She couldn’t; he was their leader, and of all people in the world, he loved Jonathan almost as much as she did.

Today they had come right at the city in full daylight. When she suggested that they go in through the tunnels, he had dismissed the notion. He wasn’t interested in entering the city center, then. That much, at least, offered her a slight measure of relief.

But only a little.

They skirted the city, east and then south, keeping to what cover they could. This entire side of Byzantium was scattered with stunted trees and the refuse of ruins-old storehouses and factories that were barely more than broken concrete foundations sporting scrub grass through widening cracks, their wooden sides and metal beams long ago scavenged for reuse.

They rode past a small electrical plant, one of several satellite centers that supported the ration of electricity to Byzantium’s citizens, and beyond that a sprawling rail station for the transportation of garbage. The tracks led directly south to the industrial wastelands, where it might be disposed of far from the capital. She watched one of the trains pull away from the station as another waited to take its place at the dock.

Overhead, the sky had begun to churn. A storm was coming. Odd how quickly the weather could turn. And this seemed to be a large one, come out of nowhere. Although she didn’t relish the idea of getting caught in a downpour, she would welcome the veil of a sluicing rain in any retreat.

Jonathan leaned forward in his saddle as they pressed southward through the scrim of scrub and ruined concrete buildings, skirting the garbage plant some five hundred yards out. Now she saw what had his attention: a walled perimeter extending beyond the last dock. It had to be twenty feet high, solid concrete, with rolled wire at the top.

Painted on the stretch of wall was the unmistakable compass of Sirin. Order’s most revered symbol.

The wind abruptly shifted again, blowing up from the south, carrying an odor far more familiar and far less appealing to her nose than garbage.

Corpses.

A putrid smell, different from any she had encountered.

She jerked back on the reins of her horse and stared past the end of the nearest dock. The great walled compound sat at the city’s perimeter like a tumor, with a sinister smokestack easily fifteen feet in diameter rising out of the middle.

Ten feet ahead of her, Jonathan had also halted. She moved up alongside him, turned to him, started to speak, and then stopped.

He was staring at the walls ahead of them, visibly shaking in his saddle.

“Jonathan?” she said.

He was too fixated to respond.

When she looked back, she wasn’t sure at first what he was looking at. The smokestack?

The sky above it?

No. He was staring at the smoke. It was faint against the backdrop of the coming storm, drifting serenely as a ghost up toward the roiling sky. Almost beautiful. Effortless as breath.

That wasn’t… that couldn’t be…

That was the smell.

With a sharp cry, Jonathan spurred his stallion forward into a hard gallop. Reacting instantly without a thought, Jordin followed hard after him-across the waste, toward the departing train, even as it began to pick up momentum. Jonathan leaned low, his stallion easily leaping the double track. Jordin glanced north, at the oncoming engine, the sound of it a banshee wail in her right ear, thirty feet off, closing-

She bent low, leaped the track just ahead of the rushing engine and spurred the horse on. A roaring gust of wind from the passing train blew her braids into her face.

Adrenaline charged her veins. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Despite fear, despite concern for Jonathan, she had been made- made- for this. Not just to feel the sides of her stallion straining beneath her or the oncoming storm in her face.

But for him . To follow him to the end of the earth.

They raced along the length of the north wall, marked every hundred feet with Sirin’s compass painted in red and faded around the edges to brown like a drying wound.

There, on the adjacent side of the perimeter, a long brick building rose from the western wall. In the middle, a wide iron gate. An entrance. Rolls of barbed wire coiled along the crest of the roof like metal serpents.

Jonathan slowed as they came to the building, pulled up, and without warning dismounted.

“What are you doing?”

“We’re here.” He drew his horse by the reins toward the building.

She swung down from her mount, glanced back toward the city. There were train tracks here, leading up from a tunnel that emerged from the city perimeter. They stopped directly before the building itself.

She glanced up at the sign above the gate.

AUTHORITY OF PASSING.

Ahead of her, Jonathan was unbuckling the scabbard at his waist.

“Jonathan… What are you doing?”

“I’m going in.”

He was going in even as everything within her was suddenly screaming Leave. Get out! Because this was not only a place of Corpses.

This was a place of death.

“How?”

Overhead in the observation windows, a guard leaned forward watching them through the glass. A second man was pointing, lifting, and speaking into something on a cord.

Panic rose up, cold inside her. There was still time. She could still get him back to safety…

“Jonathan…”

He slipped his sword through the straps of his saddle bag, secure against the horse’s flank. “There’s only one way in that I can see.”

No.

He glanced at her, held her gaze for a moment.

Do you trust me?

Do you believe me?

She could get him out. There was still time. She closed her eyes.

Yes.

When she opened them, he was already moving off toward the gate.

Yes.

She unbuckled the sword slung over her hips and hung it on the saddle next to her bow and quiver. But she left the knife tucked into her boot, conscious of its presence against her ankle as she rushed after him.

A door off the side of the gate opened and a uniformed guard stepped out. Six foot tall. Close-cut hair. He reeked. Not just of Corpse, but of the same stench emanating from the smokestack within the compound. But he was common Corpse. Not Dark Blood.

“What are you doing here?” His eyes searched both of them, lingering on Jonathan’s Nomadic braids and then his embellished tunic and then on her, before narrowing slightly.

Jonathan looked him straight in the eye. “We’ve come to turn ourselves in.”

It was all Rom could do to stop and rest the horses. Given the choice, he would have ridden them into the ground.

“We’ll kill the horses if we don’t rest them,” Triphon shouted.

“If we don’t make it, nothing matters!”

“And we’ll have less chance of getting Jonathan safely out without mounts.”

The urge to run the rest of the distance was nearly more than he could bear. But Triphon was right-his mount was frothing along his coat. They’d soon be on foot at this rate.

They stopped by the side of a brook just outside the city.

“What was he thinking?” he said, pacing.

Triphon was silent. He’d taken out the food. Neither of them touched it.

“What was he thinking?!”

“You know what he’s thinking.”

Rom had heard the story about the night they escaped from the city. Triphon was right, more than he knew. He knew exactly why Jonathan had gone to the city, and for whom.