Quartz (8 page)

“Or the post-performance hangover.” Rafe’s mouth still felt tender. Blisters were rising on his lips, making it hard to talk. “Where are we going?”

“Smaller cities, agri-caves, mining camps. Wherever Burgess leads us.”

“I need to get to Oakhaven soon.” Rafe pitched his voice low.

“We’re still in Blackstone territory, so you need to keep up your guise. Wait until Burgess’ meandering brings us closer to the border. Then we can make a straight line for Oakhaven.”

“We?”

“Of course. You didn’t think I would leave you to fall off a mountain and break your neck, would you?”

“I
have
been out in the wilderness before, you know.”

“Of course. I’m sure you know the hills around Grenfeld like the back of your hand.”

Rafe opened his mouth to tell her about his surveying apprenticeship and his overland military missions, then shut it. Far better that she think him more helpless than he really was.

“Can I have some more of that salve, please? My mouth is hurting again.” Somehow it wasn’t that difficult to sound so pathetic.

They spent the night in a stone shelter built around a well. Rafe was so tired that he fell into his bedroll soon after gulping down flatbread and vegetables, washed down with cold water. The night was short and the moon already up when they set off the next morning. Rafe exchanged his boots for thick-soled well-cushioned foot muffs, capable of protecting his feet from miles of hard rock, insulated against the cold and cinched tight against the fine sand of the low-lying valleys. They also felt like he’d strapped boards on to his feet.

Fortunately, they’d left many of their supplies back at the shelter. Burgess, expansive once more, explained to Rafe that the shelters were held in common by all performers, small traders, and other itinerants. Those groups coming from supply centers were obligated to replenish the stores. It was a good system, held together by the glue of strong self-interest and swift justice. Warmth and food were hard to come by in the Barrens.

Rafe soon inserted himself into the work of setting up and taking down camp. He mended broken wheels, helped get handcarts out of ditches, and caught pale fish from nearby streams. The performers were a gregarious bunch, and soon accepted them into his circle. They regaled him with stories of their travels and a number of embarrassing personal anecdotes, but there was one topic they avoided—Isabella.

Despite his probing, none of the firedancers gave Rafe any indication of how they knew Isabella, what she did, or how often she traveled with them. In fact, they avoided her person as much as they avoided her name in conversation, and none of them, save Burgess, would even willingly keep her company.

Five days later, during a rest stop, Burgess glanced up at Selene’s position in the sky and gave orders to move on. Rafe volunteered to fetch Isabella, who had gone off by herself beyond a hillock almost as soon as they stopped. That was not unusual; Isabella required a large amount of privacy. Rafe got the feeling that she was not comfortable with people and that traveling with a large group was wearying on her.

Rafe paused at the summit, taking a moment to check his bearings from the position of the stars. Oakhaven lay Pointwards and counterclockwise from Blackstone and they were heading in roughly the right direction. Despite his gnawing anxiety, he was not quite ready to leave the firedancers and strike out on his own. They had both more overland travel experience and supplies than he did.

Plus, he had not satisfied his curiosity about Isabella.

Rafe considered the silver-and-shadows landscape, and wondered what it would’ve been like under the twin satellites. Had the combined light of Selene and Salerus brought out colors in the landscape and nourished plants on the surface? It was almost beyond his imagination to visualize the Barrens looking anything like the agri-caves.

Walking softly—the hill was solid rock, but not gravelly—Rafe came down the other side to where Isabella sat cross-legged, turned away from him, focused inward. The bubble of quiet she normally carried around herself had expanded to fill the entire valley.

Not wanting to disturb the peace, Rafe walked up close behind her and opened his mouth to softy call her name.

The next instant he was flying. Even his soldier’s instincts hadn’t seen Isabella move until she swept his legs out from under him. Rafe hit the ground with a breath-squeezing thud, saw stars and a glittering blade, and rolled before the next blow landed.

“Rafe!” Isabella checked.

He stared up at her. At the way Selene haloed her silvery head, at the slight flush on her cheeks, at the exasperation in her eyes. Her hands were on her hips and there was no sign of the weapon she’d pulled on him. Rafe couldn’t see where she’d concealed it in her clothing.

He started to laugh.

“You dolt,” she said. “I could’ve thumped your head with a rock!” She offered him her hand.

“Or stabbed me. If you wanted to, I’d be dead right now.” Rafe let her help him up to his feet. “I was right about you. You are a fighter, and a conditioned one. What are you fighting against?”

Isabella made an annoyed noise. “Was all this just you testing out your suppositions? Next time,
ask
before trying out any dangerous experiments.”

“But you
never
tell me anything about yourself,” Rafe complained. “No, don’t go back to your meditations now. Burgess wants to get moving.”

Isabella nodded. “We’ll be at Liberty Caves by moonset. Should feel like home to you.”

“Not likely. I haven’t been back to the Grenfeld caves since I was a child.” He looked directly at her. “I have quartz sickness.”

“Oh.” Isabella looked at him with somber sympathy. “I am sorry.” She touched his shoulder briefly.

Her unexpected empathy picked at that scabbed-over wound. Rafe thought he’d become reconciled to his exile from the agri-caves of his boyhood home, but sudden memories of Grenfeld pierced him. The heavy warm smell of soil, the fresh green scent of growing things. The white glow of the quartz pillar thrusting up from the earth and into the ceiling of the vast main cavern. The songs of the workers, their faces shining with sweat, as they sowed and weeded and picked upon the stone-rimmed terraces.

Since the onset of his sickness, Rafe couldn’t endure the presence of any of the great veins of quartz. But his memories insisted on painting the hollows and contours of the agri-caves as happy places. For a moment he ached to be a boy again, lying in the wheat, plucking berries with purple-stained fingers, basking in the yellow blaze of the megalamps.

But that life could never be Rafe’s. His brother was Lord Grenfeld now. He was the one who consulted with the Chief Grower and walked the fields and that was just as it should be.

“Good thing I’m only the younger son,” Rafe said cheerfully. “A life of placid farming wouldn’t suit me at all.”

“Perhaps,” said Isabella.

Rafe felt the Liberty Caves quartz as a tingle in his feet, a tingle that traveled up to his stomach and became a ball of lead. The entrance to the agri-caves was on the opposite side of a small valley, a saucer-shaped depression that had been blasted down to bare rock. Walls rose sheer and multibanded one either side of the performers as they traveled down a broad path into the valley. The road’s slope was gentle enough for transport carriers to bring in compost and take away produce.

The firedancers surged forward when they got to level ground. Agri-caves meant fresh food—warm ripe berries, tender greens with crumbs of black dirt still clinging to them, fresh-picked carrots and corn and whatever else might be ready according to that particular cave’s schedule.

Isabella dropped back to walk at the rear with Rafe. “Are you all right?”

“I will be, as long as I’m not in charge of digging up tubers for tonight’s stew,” he said, trying for some humor. His skin felt flushed and warm, and anxiety jangled within him. Once he had thought his hypersensitivity to quartz might actually be useful as a surveyor, but the wretched disease manifested only around worked quartz. Being here now only reminded him of the home he could never return to again.

Unless he really
wanted
to go into a convulsive fit, smash his head on a rock, and drool all over himself.

“I don’t think we’ll get so much as a shriveled-up tuber for tonight’s dinner. Look ahead.” Isabella pointed.

They’d rounded a bend in the road. The entrance was directly ahead.

An entrance separated from them by a tall chain-link fence, a field’s worth of barbed wire, mage lights mounted on tall posts, several battered machines, and soldiers in Blackstone red and black.

Rafe’s head throbbed. He slipped his hand into his pocket and gripped the stolen device from the train. It fit his hand as if it had been made for it, and he focused on its creased surface as he walked into a tangle of searing light that only he could see.

Through the pain lancing his skull, he caught Burgess’ words as flashes, “…custom, man, tradition… centuries old… no wanderers are turned away from the caves!” And jagged splinters from the Blackstone senior officer “…change in policy… no one allowed save authorized personnel… leave… or be arrested…”

The light intensified, blurred his sight, threatened to explode his skull.
Please don’t let me have a fit right here, right now!
Rafe backed away… if only he could slip back up the road… the quartz here must be close to the surface, to cause this kind of reaction…

Isabella grabbed his wrist.

“What are you doing?” she whispered. “Turn it off!”

And Rafe looked down and saw that there really was a white halo and it came from his clenched fist. Light spilled through his fingers, and his palm was hot around the mage device.

It was so bright that Burgess and the Blackstone officer broke off their argument and stood staring.

“You there,” called the officer. “What do you have? Handheld mage lights are military only. You can’t bring such a device in here!”

“He needs it. He has the nightsweats,” Isabella called out, adding yet another malady to his list of afflictions.

Rafe thumbed the device until the light dimmed, but it didn’t go out entirely. “D-do I have to?” He didn’t have to work hard to force the stutter. “I-I-I-I paid good money, man, and the d-d-dark… she has f-f-fingers… everywhere… man, I swear it!” He ended on a high note of terror.

The officer shot him a look of contempt. “Oh, get on with you. Get back up the road, away from here.”

“Shoo, Breveldo.” Burgess gestured savagely. “We’ll meet you once we’re done here.” Turning to the officer, he said, “Now about those radishes…”

“Burgess can outtalk anyone,” said Isabella as the two of them made a great show of scrambling away from the military might of Blackstone. “We might actually get those tubers tonight.”

The pressure of the quartz eased. Once out of sight, Rafe slowed and opened his hand. Weak light dripped off his fingers and puddled at his feet, creating a shadow-splotched picture. Rafe caught his breath as he recognized it. The device throbbed on his palm, glowing behind its curlicues.

Isabella squinted at the device, then at the picture it made on the road. “Not very pretty, that. Some kind of deformed dog with mangy fur? What do you suppose it’s for?”

Rafe pushed his fingers into the depressions, then shook it. The device turned off and the picture disappeared. He answered as casually as he could. “It’s some kind of mage-made novelty, perhaps for shadow theater, to do the backdrops. It doesn’t look like it’s working right. They do break sometimes, or else it needs fresh quartz.” He tapped the ovoid shell. “If I can figure out how to get it open.”

“Hmm. Where did you find it?”

Rafe did not reply and Isabella did not press him. After a searching look, she turned to walk back up to the top of the canyon.

Rafe stared at the spot where the device had cast its light. What Isabella had seen as some kind of abstract picture was a map, a map that any surveyor would’ve recognized, depicting landmarks below and a star chart above. A map that pinpointed the exact location of the agri-caves they had just visited. Rafe knew of such devices, each mapping the location of a massive vein of quartz. These devices had helped his people find the quartz veins after the Scorching had laid the earth bare.

His uncle had three of them, and in scholarly circles it was widely accepted that they were three of Renat’s Keys.

And Rafe might have found a fourth.

E
VEN THE HOSTILITY OF
the Blackstone military at the agri-caves didn’t prepare Rafe for the shock of the mining camp. The few permanent buildings were brick shacks with tin roofs, surrounded by a huddle of tents made of worn canvas and held up by bamboo poles. Hills of rubble and open hearths took up most of the camp. Hoisting machinery with rusty chains, empty ore buckets, and carts abandoned on their sides dotted the landscape. Judging by the basaltic rock and red-stained soil, this mine had once produced iron and copper. Smoke from the smelting process lingered over the place, but there was no industry.

Tension hung thick in the air.

The miners were rail-thin men and women, pale under a lifetime of soot and grime. When Burgess called a cheery hello, his heartiness was almost a sacrilege in that circle of wildly hopeful faces.

“Tell me”—the leader had the shrunken, loose-skinned look of a big man gone to waste—“that the Protector sent you.” His voice held the rasp of unshed tears.

“Nay.” Burgess spoke gently as if to a frightened child. “We are only traveling performers.”

The words snuffed out the light in their eyes. The leader sagged.

Rafe pushed forward. “Perhaps we can help? We are many, and strong. Has there been an accident?”

“No. Yes. Yes. Many accidents. Too many to count, too many lost. Voices in the dark, winds in the deeps, fires burning forever under the earth.” A cold shiver slid down Rafe’s spine. The leader thrust his hand through sooty hair and smiled a ghastly smile. “Come, we can give you water and a place to lay your sleeping rolls for the night. Rest, if the shades of the earth will let you.” He shuffled away without any further instructions and the rest of his people drifted away to desultory tasks. Isabella frowned.