Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

Chaka pushed in against the wall and Silas sat down beside her. “Chaka tells me you’ve been doing some work for her.”

Shannon nodded. “She wanted me to see if I could find the track of the Endine expedition.”

A chill blew through Silas’s soul. “I assume you succeeded or we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

He glanced at Chaka. “I found some markings up on Wilderness Road. You know where that is?”

Silas had never been on it, but he knew that it was about 140 miles north, that it led northeast from Argon, running roughly parallel to the Ohio. “Yes,” he said.

“We know that’s where they started. I followed it for a couple of days. To Ephraim’s Bluff, which is pretty much on the edge of League territory. Just beyond Ephraim’s Bluff there are several sets of marks.”

“What kind of marks?”

“Tree cuts. Always three strokes. Piles of rocks. Three rocks with a fourth on top. They probably used some chalk too. There’s some granite up there and I’d have chalked it if I were making a trail.”

“But there’s no chalk now?”

“How could there be after all these years?”

“How old are the marks are on the trees?”

“Can’t tell. At least five or six years. Maybe ten. Damn, maybe twenty.”

Silas looked at Chaka, and then swung his gaze back to Shannon. “That’s it?”

Shannon frowned. “What more did you want?”

A waiter arrived and they ordered beer for Chaka and Silas, and dinner for everybody.

“Wilderness Road isn’t really much of a road,” said Shannon. “Nobody uses it except hunters and traders. And the military. Those people all know their territory pretty well, so it would have to be a special set of circumstances that anybody would need to leave guide marks.” Silas could see the big man liked his beer. He finished it off and set the stein down gently. “I’d be willing to bet I was looking at Endine’s jump-off point.”

The pub was busy. It was dinner hour and the dining room was filled with laughter and the sizzle of steak and the aroma of cold brew. Candles flickered on the walls.

“I don’t know you well, Jon,” said Silas, “so I hope you won’t take this personally.” He looked at Chaka. “You hired him to take a look, right?”

“Yes,” she said, puzzled.

“Was it a flat rate? Or did he get more money if he brought back a positive answer?”

Her features darkened. “He wouldn’t lie. But yes, it was a flat rate.”

Silas nodded. “Good. So what do you propose to do now?”

She looked surprised. “I’m going after it,” she said.

“On the strength of a few marked trees.”

“It’s a chance. But it’s a good chance.” Her eyes blazed. “Listen, Silas, the truth about what happened to my brother is out there somewhere.”

“I hate to put it this way, Chaka. But what does it matter? He’s dead. And Karik’s dead. What’s the point?”

Across the room, someone cheered. They were celebrating a birthday.

“I think the truth is worth something, don’t you?” She fixed him with her blue gaze. “Anyway, Haven might be at the end of the road.”

Silas looked from her to the dark-skinned giant. “I’m sixty years old. I’m not really in condition for taking off on a wild chase. Especially not one that’s already killed a substantial number of people.”

Disappointment clouded her features. “Okay. I thought you’d be the first to want to go. There’ll be others.”

“I doubt it.”

Shannon was studying the ceiling.

“How about you?” Silas asked him. “Are you going?”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because Haven doesn’t mean anything to me. Because I don’t believe it exists. Because you—” he was gazing at Chaka now, “—and anyone who goes with you, will most certainly fail, and possibly lose your lives.”

Silas turned back to Chaka. “I think he makes sense.”

Their meals arrived. The menu at the Lost Hope was fairly limited. It consisted of either beef or chicken, depending on the chef’s mood, and the vegetable du jour, and bread. On this occasion, the chef’s mood called for chicken, and the vegetable was cabbage.

“I think we all need to be reasonable,” Silas said.

Chaka sat back with her arms folded, stared at Silas for a few moments, picked up a knife, and sliced a strip of meat from the breast. “Haven doesn’t mean anything to Jon,” she said. “What does it mean to you? Ten years from now you’ll be seventy. You want to look back on this and know there was a chance you might have found the entire body of Mark Twain’s work, and who knows what else, but you didn’t bother? Because it was dangerous?”

Illyrian women caught in compromising situations lost their reputations, prospects, and often their incomes. (Men, as usual, operated on a somewhat different standard.) No decent person would associate openly with a woman who’d become entangled in scandal. She was no longer welcome at her place of employment; her customers disappeared; and she could expect to be turned out by her family.

The risks for unmarried women were intensified by a lack of reliable contraceptive devices. Various ointments and oils, if applied prior to sexual activity, were supposed to prevent conception. But it was hard to determine their efficacy. No one kept statistics, and everybody lied about sex. Chaka concluded, as did most women, that the potential consequences outweighed the game. And so virtue reigned in Illyria.

This state of affairs had, to a degree, evolved from a line of emperors and kings who believed that the stability of the city required a solid family tradition, which they had enforced with the power of the priesthood and a series of laws prohibiting divorce and confining sexual activity within the marriage bond. Violators were subject to a range of criminal penalties which, for a time under Aspik III and Mogan the Wise, included burning at the stake.

In the Republic, such laws were considered barbaric. Nevertheless, the moral code from which they had sprung was alive and well, and if offending women could no longer be deprived of their physical existence, they could lose virtually everything else.

Chaka was not a virgin, but she rarely strayed across the line, and had not done so at all within the recent past. Tonight, though, as she returned from her frustrating meeting with Silas Glote, she needed to talk with Raney, to be with him, to accept whatever comfort he might provide. For that reason, she had declined Jon Shannon’s offer to escort her home. (“What will you do now?” Shannon had asked as she’d departed, and she’d replied that she would follow the trail, that she had friends, that there were plenty of people who would join her to look for Haven. And his lips had lightened and he’d warned her to forget it. “But if you must go,” he’d added, “take no strangers. Take nobody you wouldn’t trust with your life. Because that’s how it’ll be.”)

Raney lived alone in a small farmhouse outside Epton Village, about two miles northwest of the city. She left through the northern gate and rode out on the Cumbersak Trail. Travel was relatively safe within a few miles of Illyria. The roads were heavily patrolled now that the wars had stopped, and the old-time bandits who had once owned the highways after sundown were either dead or in hiding. Nonetheless, she always carried a gun when she traveled at night.

The moon was high and it was late when she rode through the hedges that surrounded Raney’s wood frame house. His dog. Clip, barked at her approach, and Raney appeared in his doorway.

“Didn’t expect to see you tonight,” he said. “How’d the meeting go?”

She tossed him her reins and climbed down. “Could have been better.”