Sarah Zettel - Reclamation

Jay touched a series of commands he had memorized weeks before they landed here. No response came from the unit. No messages from the Unifiers, then. No change in status to report to their people down here stirring up trouble. Cor and Lu spent a lot of time cursing about the lack of attention their project was receiving from the bureaucracy back on May 16, even with the Vitae so interested in the Realm. Jay suspected both of them were on somebody’s mud list by now for failing to make scheduled reports.

Neither side knew how many messages were being “lost” during transmission.

Jay touched the keys again in a sequence that Lu and Cor had no idea was valid. The transmitter responded by scattering what could have been a random series of symbols from a dozen different alphabets across the screen. Jay took his translator disk out of his ear and slipped it into the download slot in the transmitter. The screen cleared instantly. Jay reclaimed the disk.

As soon as he had replaced the translator in his ear, Caril’s voice spoke to him. “We have released the artifact Stone in the Wall. She and Eric Born were allowed to escape confinement twenty hours prior to my sending this message…”

Jay sat in his tiny pool of light, feeling the cold seep into him as he listened to the details.

Blood, blood, blood! he cursed. Now we have to hunt down her family. He thought about Trail and her eyes, but couldn’t work the brief glimpse of a resemblance into a full-fledged hope. How could those idiots have done this! They know I’ve got nothing to work with down here! For a brief moment, he knew how Lu and Cor felt, bereft of resources and support.

He tried to tell himself it was only a setback, not a dead end. And it would have been very bad if the Assembly had found out how Stone in the Wall functioned before they did, but it was still bad enough. If the Imperialists didn’t have a thorough grasp of how the artifacts functioned by the time the Assembly parties came over the World’s Wall, the chance to win the Home Ground would be gone.

Of course, the two Unifiers thought that was the deadline for having the Realm’s power base reorganized under a monarch who wanted to join the Human Family.

None of which leaves any more time for sitting around here.

Jay climbed out of the flood cup and down to the canyon floor. The sky above him had turned smoky grey, but its light hadn’t yet traveled far enough over the Walls to show him his way, so he kept the lantern on and picked his path between the fallen rocks and frozen puddles as fast as he could.

After about three miles, the darkness ended and Jay stepped out of the canyon’s shadow into the filtered, hazy glow that passed for daylight in the Realm.

The Teachers said that Broken Canyon was where the Nameless Powers had argued about the word for “stone.” The entire breadth of it was a mass of jagged promontories, caves, cups, and gashes. The Walls didn’t even stand up straight. They sloped open like the canyon was yawning.

When the Nameless had finally come to an agreement, went the story, they made up for the botched job by painting the canyon in a spectacular fashion. The rain hadn’t made it out here, so the colors were still dry. Veins of silver and quartz shot through bands of crimson, rust, vermilion, violet, and sparkling sandstone. Here and there you could even catch a glimpse of a slick, greyish patch of exposed silicate.

Jay could remember the tremor of excitement in Lu’s voice when he’d discovered that the slick, grey “rock” was really a manufactured silicate lying under the dirt and gravel of the Realm. It meant that MG49 sub 1 was not just a failed colony, it was a fallen world, and who knew how much of their technology might have survived under the ground?

Broken Canyon measured three miles wide at its base, but he still felt hemmed in by the walls that were too huge to be taken in with a single glance. It got worse when he remembered that these were the smaller walls, and that the black, ragged stretch where the horizon should have been was a hundred times bigger.

Four years, as Jay and his two companions measured time, had passed and he had never gotten used to the sight. Jay looked at the ground and started down the slope through the screen of scraggly trees and underbrush. The spectacular colors of the walls almost compensated for the tan, grey, and olive green of the stunted trees and spiky reeds that poked out of the skimpy patches of soil. Moss and lichens gave the rocks coats of fuzz.

The sounds of life drifted up to him on the back of the omnipresent wind. Hooves and skids clattered against rock and sank into mud. Voices bounced off the boulders in an incoherent babble that seemed to come from all directions at once, all mixed up with the thousand little noises that came from constant motion. Jay shoved his way through a thicket of thorny trees and finally got a clear view of the muddy, pockmarked road.

King Silver had told him, rather proudly, that forcing the Narroways Approach across the canyon floor had cost a thousand lives. The lichen-covered mounds of boulders heaped alongside the roadbed gave a lot of credence to the body count.

A flood of travelers poured down and around the wide road today. Clear, dry spells were not to be wasted, war or no war. Even in the traffic, though, they clung together in knots of their own kind. Caravans of Bondless shouted over their creaking sleighs and snorting oxen. They gave a grudging berth to a gaggle of Bonded trotting along with their overseer. An enclosed sledge that bore the ribbons of some Noble house rattled along at the center of an entourage which shoved an impartial path through the rest of the traffic.

Along the side of the road, framing the scene, the bundles of Notouch women in their ragged motley picked their own paths between the rocks and the weeds. The girls who could walk struggled to keep up with their mothers, aunts, and older sisters. The babies were carried on the stooped backs of the oldest women.

Jay frowned at them. Those roving bands were what was making it so impossible to track Stone in the Wall. If only the Ancestors had been a little more obvious in designing their servants, but, aside from the trained telekinetics, there were no differences between these walking artifacts that could be seen without a gene scan. Uary had theories. The Notouch might have been the “untouched,” blank slates that were the control group for the Ancestors’ work, or kept to use for later modification. That the telekinesis could crop up anywhere lent credence to the story from their “apocrypha” about the war against the Teachers that drove the power-gifted into hiding and humiliation until they’d learned their lesson.

Or until the others learned they couldn’t live without them, thought Jay, watching the ragged parade of so many men and women and so few children.

But none of these theories explained what Stone in the Wall was, or why her family was relegated to the Notouch caste. The traits that made her what she was were not shared by the caste in general any more than the telekinesis was shared by all the Nobles. Cor had met Stone in the Wall in Narroways. She came from a cluster of huts that had no name, and probably wasn’t even there anymore. Like most Notouch women, she spent her time roving between cities and farms as a “hired” hand while the men stayed in the village and kept the place from being washed away. By the time Cor had tried to track her family, Stone in the Wall’s band was gone and no one would admit to knowing anything about her. Trail and Cups hadn’t even been willing to say they’d come to Narroways with a work band.

Chaos, it was all chaos. This was what happened when there was no vision, no conscious plan. Entropy laid hold of individual minds, and everything that had been built…collapsed.