Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

Is now the time for this? Kelat chided himself. You are walking on the Home Ground! Your job is to help coordinate this great work and you can’t even coordinate your own thoughts!

“Contractor Kelat.” Kelat became aware that one of the voices in his helmet was calling his name. “Contractor Kelat?”

“Kelat here.” He touched a key on his wrist terminal to lay a display grid over the landscape his eyes saw. Each Vitae became targeted by a pinprick of gold light. He swung his gaze back and forth until one pinprick turned red.

“Historian-Beholden Baiel, Contractor,” said the voice. “I think you need to see this.” An anonymous figure in a Historian’s grey suit stood beside a gleaming pillar that was twice as tall as he was and waved at him.

“I’m coming, Beholden.” Minding his footing, Kelat picked his way through the mounds of dust and wreckage to Baiel’s side.

The Beholden didn’t even see him arrive. His attention was totally fastened on the cylindrical pillar.

Kelat studied it. For a moment, all he saw were its surprisingly smooth sides that glinted in the harsh daylight. The top was ragged, like the wall of the ruined building they had landed beside. Indistinct shadows played across it from…

Kelat blinked, and looked again. No. The shadows weren’t moving across the surface, they drifted inside the pillar itself. Kelat pressed his faceplate against the pillar’s side. The pillar reflected his face back at him and he saw his own wide eyes and undignified, slack-jawed surprise. Beyond that, under whatever silicate, or polymer, or glass this was, something shifted. A blob of shadow the size of Kelat’s head flowed slowly toward the pillar’s uneven top and hung there for a moment. Then it drew its soft edges in toward its center and began to swim, or fly, or creep back toward the bottom.

“Blood of my ancestors,” he whispered. “Blood of my ancestors.”

An irrational voice in the back of his head wondered if that might not very well be true.

The rain came down like the wrath of some ancient god. Even with his lantern in his fist, Jay couldn’t see more than a yard past the tip of his boots. A solid wall of water reflected the light right back at him. It wasn’t all water, though. Slivers of ice smacked against his faceplate like they meant to chip the silicate.

Behind him, the two Notouch women steadied each other. As soon as the squall started up, they wrapped their headcloths around their faces to protect themselves from the ice and to make sure they had pockets of air to breathe. You could literally drown in some of these rains. Now they held tight to each other’s arms, walking in a measured, rocking gait that let them balance against each other as they picked their way over the slick, bare rock of the canyon floor.

If there’d ever been soil here, years of wind and water had washed it away, leaving nothing but granite and sandstone. Jay’s lantern showed up bands of pale pink and flecks of gold underfoot that might have been beautiful had there been daylight to shine on any of them.

Jay glanced up. The bulk of the ragged canyon Wall was indistinguishable from the black sky overhead. The darkness left him no way to pick out the clouds and measure their weight or their movement. If the deluge didn’t stop soon, he could be in trouble. A river could start down the walls, and in this thread-thin canyon, they’d all be washed away and buried in the swamps. Already the rain filled the hollows between the stones underfoot until the puddles overflowed into one another. In places he was up to his ankles in ice water. The women must have been just about numb, but, then, they were used to this. After four years of tramping up and down in the Realm’s insane weather, Jay still couldn’t see how they stood it. He thought about Cor waiting behind with the oxen. At least she could climb under the sledge’s canvas cover and stay dry.

Finally, the water and the darkness split far enough to let through the white spark of another light. Jay resisted the impulse to hurry. Slipping on the wet stone would take him down hard even through the layers of wool and leather he wore, and he had nothing to catch himself against but more slick stone.

The puddles were turning into brooks, fast. One of the Notouch, Broken Trail, he thought, pointed toward the white light and shouted something to her cousin. Jay beckoned at them impatiently. Empty Cups glanced backward and then forward, and evidently decided she’d come too far to carry through any thoughts of turning around. She trudged forward with her cousin.

Jay forced himself to concentrate on each step until he could see the curving, white sides of the shelter. The brightly lit entranceway opened like a warm welcome. He ducked down the short corridor made of polymer sheets over a jointed framework and breathed a sigh of relief. Behind him, Empty Cups pulled Broken , Trail back. The cousins stood in the downpour, shouting in each other’s ears to be heard above the storm.

Jay motioned for them to come inside. They obeyed hesitantly.

Always the same, he thought. They’ll walk up a dark canyon and through a downpour, but as soon as they get to the dry, well-lit place, they get scared.

He stripped off his glove. Cold sank through his skin straight to his bone. He hammered on the inner door. The door peeled back and let loose a flood of powered light.

“Welcome back, Jay,” said Lu as he stepped back to let the three soaking travelers inside.

Jay felt the muscles in his back relax immediately in the warm, still air. The icy rain became nothing but a distant thunder outside the curving walls. He pulled off his faceplate and shucked the dripping cape, hanging both on an empty hook amid the emergency gear and corporate issue outerwear that none of the Unifier Team bothered with. He snatched up one of the extra towels Lu kept piled on a spare crate and wiped the spattering of rain off his round face and bald scalp.

The dome was a long way from luxurious. Most of the gear was stashed in polymer crates. The crates were stacked between equipment that still had half its paneling open, exposing wires and chips in bundles of black and orange, blue and green. Jay had at one point wondered what Lu did with his days when he was supposed to be making the base not just usable, but livable. Then he had learned that, for Lu, this jumble was livable.

“Who’ve you got for us?” Lu beamed through his scruffy, brown beard at the two women and switched to the language of the Realm. “The Nameless called this day fine, for we have met in it.” Lu held up his hands. He’d had the hand marks of one of the Bondless drawn on their backs in indelible ink. The women relaxed visibly. Now they knew where they were in terms of how to act.

They both knelt on the shelter’s smooth polymer floor. The older of the pair said, “Know, good sir, that this despised one is Broken Trail dena Rift in the Clouds and with her is Empty Cups dena Reed in the Wind, and we beg to know how we may serve.”

Lu suppressed a grimace and Jay shrugged. When they’d first started the search, Lu had tried to get the Notouch to stop groveling, but found it didn’t work. The Notouch obeyed the rules of a lifetime and simply didn’t trust anybody who told them that the rules were unnecessary. They were so stubborn about it that Jay found himself wondering if some kind of specific subservience hadn’t been bred into them by the old masters of this place. Their caste system had probably evolved around whatever categories their makers had originally placed them in. But then there was Stone in the Wall…But she had been an exception and it was beginning to look like that wasn’t the only thing she’d been an exception to.