David Drake: The Heretic

Maybe it swings inside to out, Abel thought. Or maybe it slides to the side into an opening. That would be interesting to see.

Abel had always been good at picturing sizes and arrangements of things in the world, and figuring out how things moved or might look on the other side just by thinking about them. He’d been surprised to find that not everybody could do this, not even some adults.

On the right side of the matted door was a metal plate with a long piece of flat, dark metal emerging from it. Abel moved closer and saw that the flat piece was the shaft of a key. It was sticking out of a keyhole.

Abel had seen metal locks like this before in Lindron on the very old buildings, but this was the first he’d come across in the week they’d lived here in Hestinga. He’d been interested enough to ask his father how locks worked, and his father had demonstrated a wooden version on a small reed chest in his office that held his military credentials and the jade insectoid scarab he used to set a wax seal on official documents.

This key is larger. It’s huge.

Abel approached warily. It was at about eye-height to him. He reached up, touched it.

Cold metal. Old metal.

It was made of steel, not iron, and was perfectly smooth. He ran a finger along its edge. It had the fine-cut profile of nishterlaub , a holy metal item from the Chaos Times, the nightmare days before the Law had been revealed to the priests by Zentrum, and the priests brought peace to the Land. Abel knew what to do if he found nishterlaub. Don’t touch. Tell a priest.

But the storehouse was in the midst of the Treville District temple compound. Everyone obviously knew about it. This nishterlaub had been collected by the priests themselves. So what could it hurt to-

Before Abel quite realized what he was doing, he turned the key.

Click.

The lock was well-oiled and offered no resistance. Turning the key caused a plate on the door to pop out from its recess by a finger span to reveal a small pulling ring.

Never saw anything like that before.

In fact, the lock seemed as complicated as the most complex thing Abel knew: the firing mechanism on his father’s musket. Abel had seen plenty of those. He was the son of a soldier, after all. But complicated or not, with a musket what it finally came down to was pulling the trigger.

So just pull it. See what happens.

Abel grasped the ring and leaned backward. The door didn’t budge.

The sand. The buildup at the base of the door was keeping it in place. Abel swept it away with the sole of his sandal.

He tried again, this time throwing all his might into the effort. The door moved, swung outward an arm’s length. Abel stumbled back a step as a whoosh of musty air escaped. It set him to coughing.

After he recovered, Abel glanced inside. Dark, but some light got in through window slits set in rows around all four walls. Still, pretty scary in there. Abel stepped away, glanced around the storehouse yard.

There wasn’t much by way of a weapon to carry along with him, not even a stick. There was a stone, a black rock from here in the Valley, sitting not far away that, upon further examination, Abel figured must have been intended as a doorstop.

It was all he could do to pick it up with both hands and carry it next to his belly, but any weapon was better than nothing. So armed, he returned to the door and slipped inside the storehouse.

The air inside was cool and stale. He looked up and saw that the window slits near the ceiling were covered with actual glass. Glass was not considered nishterlaub, but it was something you could only find and were not allowed to make, so windows were rare in the Land. Windows were for priests and high officials. Windows were for keeping out rain and wind from important places.

And I guess for some storehouses, Abel thought.

Anyway, you normally didn’t need windows in the Land. Strong gusts sometimes blew up the Valley before the spring floods, but usually the winds of the Land were light. Abel had never seen any rain, but his mother had sung him jingles about it. The songs were about water falling from the sky, as strange as that sounded. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in rain, it was more that he had a hard time picturing it. Abel imagined rain as thick and syrupy, falling brown and silty like the River’s water, and leaving everything with a fine coating of mud.

After his eyes adjusted, Abel stepped farther inside the storehouse. It was a large room, large enough to contain an average-sized house. The ceiling stretched a good twenty spans above him. The official residence he and his father shared could fit in here easily, with space to spare for an outhouse and stable.

This is sure no granary.

All about him were shapes. Twisted, strange shapes like midnight shadows. Large, square shapes. The glint of iron and copper and steel. Glass. Wood. In front of him, a white-colored pipe stretching out perpendicular from some sort of box with what looked like dead briars curling out. Odd. The pipe glinted almost a bit like metal, a bit like glass.

He reached out and touched it-

And recoiled in shock. Plastic .

The pipe was nishterlaub. Abel looked around again and realization dawned. The pipe, the strange shapes, everything in the storehouse. It was all nishterlaub.

His immediate thought was to turn tail and run, find a priest or his father, tell them what he’d found.

But that’s stupid, he thought. The priests know the nishterlaub is here. They must have put it here. But I’ll bet I will still get in trouble.

Was it wrong for him to be here?

Most of his friends from Lindron would sure think so. Of course, most of them wouldn’t have opened the door in the first place. He’d barely been able to convince those guys to leave the alley behind the married officer’s quarters. He’d dared them to go out and explore, and when nobody accompanied him, he’d gone himself.

Abel felt the familiar pain of remembering Lindron. Lindron was the before life. All gone.

Gone with Mamma.

She’d called him her brave boy, her little Carnadon Man. Was he still brave without her?

He would try to be. And the priests could give him a hiding if they wanted, he didn’t care. Besides, he knew he’d start wondering about the nishterlaub and have to come back to have a look at it sooner or later. He’d be back.

So might as well look around now.

Interesting,said a voice. It was a dry voice, high pitched. Abel was unable to tell if it had come from a man or woman. He spun around. Nothing. No one there.

He moved deeper into the storage house.

A likely lad, maybe , another voice said, this one deeper and definitely male. Then again, maybe not.

Abel lifted the rock he carried in his hands to his shoulder, ready to strike.

“Who’s there?” he said, trying not to let his voice quiver with the fright he felt.

No one answered.

After a moment, Abel decided he must have heard soldiers speaking outside. The storage house was next to the temple guard exercise yard, after all. Maybe a platoon had shown up for morning duty.

But the voices had sounded close. Very close.

Okay, it’s time to get out of here.

Abel turned to go.

But all this nishterlaub, he thought. I have to see it.

He looked to his right, to the strange box-shaped thing growing briars with the white plastic pipe emerging from it.

Not briars. Not anything that grew from the earth. Abel stooped down, looked closer. They were like vines, yet unlike. A sheath of colorful skin covered a core that glinted reddish-brown, like copper. No, it was copper, somehow.