The Way of Things: Upper Kingdom Boxed Set: Books 1, 2 and 3 in the Tails of the Upper Kingdom (117 page)

And as he bent back to the
Killer of Lions, Long-Swift released one breath and then another. He was
playing a dangerous game, distracting the Khargan from the Singer of Songs in
his head. He didn’t want to take a woman from the village, not when the Singer
was slipping through his mind. He was becoming obsessed with the thought of
her, couldn’t wait to lay his head down in the snow at night for her to visit
in his dreams.

He wondered if it could be
called treason, and if it were, what that might mean. Dreams and reality rarely
mixed well. If she were riding with the Army of Blood and if he met her in
battle, he might be forced to kill her after all and that, he realized, would
be a very tragic thing. She had captivated him, body and soul.

Perhaps, that was her intent.
She was the Enemy, after all.

With that thought, he emptied
the wotchka and rose to his feet.

“Where are you going?” asked the
Khan.

“To find a woman,” he said.

The Khargan grunted and
Long-Swift left the tent for the bitterness and the cold.

***

The CommWing was heavily
guarded and they walked along a narrow corridor that used to be a moving
sidewalk that no longer moved. All the windows were old ArcEyes as well and he
wondered what time of day it was. He wondered what the compound itself looked
like from the outside, what sort of buildings they were, whether the grounds
were landscaped, whether there were farms. So far, all he had seen was
interiors. Stairwells, undergrounds, labs, ozone lights, metal floors, plastic
chairs.

There was not one potted
plant in the place and he doubted that anyone knew how beautiful the world was
outside the fence.

There was music everywhere,
however. It sounded like a small chamber orchestra and he wondered if it was
from archives. It had an organic, echoing sound to it and it was growing louder
as the four of them trotted up a long wide set of stairs to a crowded
mezzanine. He smiled as he spied a quartet was playing Haydn in the center of a
breezeway. Two violins, a viola and a cello singing the song of strings, as
people in colourful jumpsuits moved past. Everyone stared at him as he went by,
gave him a very wide berth and he realized it was because of his hair. Everyone
else was bald.

Shaved, he realized, for he
could see the shadows above the hairlines. Even the women. It made sense in a
way. If they believed that every living thing existed to kill, then it would be
important to remove any safe harbor for bacteria, mites and parasites. The
human head was a gold mine for critters.

Beneath her goggled cap and
tattooed eyebrows, Damaris Ward was likely as bald as a billiard ball.

“How many people in DC?” he
asked.

“CD?” she corrected. “Seven
thousand seven hundred and thirty-six.”

“More or less,” he grinned.

“Exactly. We have sixteen
women pregnant.”

“Seventeen if you count the
Scholar in the Court of the Empress.”

“Scholar? What Scholar?”

“I don’t think you’ve met
her. She’s a skinny girl with orange and black stripes. Smart as a whip for a
monster.”

She raised a tattooed brow
but said nothing and they passed through the colourful breezeway into yet
another corridor.

Finally up a spiral staircase
and into a building with huge screens on the walls and armed guards flanking
the doors. Ward was waved through and Solomon watched as the door swung open on
pulleys in the ceiling. Ramshackle, he thought again. He wondered what their
power source was.

In to another room, smaller
and dark with floor-to-ceiling bronzed ArcEyes. A waiting area and he was
surprised to see books on a table. Books. He hadn’t seen a book in ages. He
couldn’t help it. He picked one up, opened the cover, breathed in the woodsy
smell of very old paper, fading ink and time.

“We wait,” said Ward. He
smiled at her and she didn’t seem to know what to do with her eyes.

After several long minutes, a
door swung open and a woman stepped out. She was short and stocky, had eyes
like little stones and her buzzed head revealed a shadow of silver hair.

“Cece?”

“Jeffery Solomon, you old
dog…”

And he swept her up into the
air, spun her around and around, utterly ignoring the look of horror on the
face of Damaris Ward.

“Put me down, you idiot,”
grumbled Celine Carr in her clipped English accent. “You’ll bust my other hip.”

But she was smiling and did
not let go of him when her feet touched the floor.

He held her out at arm’s
length.

“You look…”

“Old,” she said. “It’s
alright. You can say it. It has been a millennium or two, after all…”

“When the hell did you wake
up? And how? Max—“

“One moment, Jeffery.” And
she glared at the other woman in the room. “Thank you, Jiān Ward but I am
completely safe with Dr. Solomon.”

“Si,” said Damaris but
Solomon cut her off.

“Could you please check on my
friends?” he asked. “Just make sure they are alive, unharmed and together. I’ll
sort this out asap. Would you do that for me please, Damaris?”

“Si,” she said again. “I’ll
do this for you.”

“And please let me know once
you know they’re safe.” He glanced at the woman he knew as Cece. “How would she
let me know?”

“Transfer,” ordered Celine.

Ward reached up to the wire
at the base of her skull, pulled the tiny plug from its tip, reached over to
affix it to Solomon’s. He gasped as the current buzzed directly into his brain,
but then grinned.

“You just gave me your
number. I feel like a seventeen year-old kid.”

She rolled her eyes and took
back the plug but she was smiling before withdrawing from the room.

“In here,” said Celine and
she led him into another room. It was completely black with six large screens
and a set of rolling chairs.

Celine wheeled a chair
towards him, lowered herself down.

“Sit, Jeffery. The titanium
is wearing out of these old legs.”

She had been right earlier
on. She looked perhaps seventy-five but he knew she had to be older. Her face
was hard, weathered and sharp as steel, but truth be told, she had looked the
same even before they went under.

“Would you like some tea?”
she asked and he grinned. Cats, Brits. Funny how both loved their tea.

“Nah, but thanks,” he said,
reaching over to take her hands and she raised a brow at him.

“Ah, yes. You still need to
touch. I remember.”

“It’s a weird thing, coming
back like that.”

“Yes, it is.”

“So? SleepLab Two was
obviously a success.”

“Moderately,” she agreed.
“Six of us survived. We woke about forty-five years ago. From what I
understand, there was a meteor storm and that damned satellite was sent into a
very high orbit. On every anniversary of the wake date, it would repeat the
signal. I don’t know how long it was doing that, centuries I think, but
somehow, it started the process. We lost Khofi Mamadou.”

He nodded. He hadn’t known
Khofi well, but still.

“It took years, Jeffery.
Years to make the preparations to wake everyone else. The Canadian Shield is a
very harsh place in winter. It was such a damned struggle…”

Her eyes grew distant as she
remembered.

“But we did it. After six and
half years, we began waking the others. We had decided on five outposts, with
Marathon as the central base, but five new outposts to begin civilization here
in NorAm. Each base got five hundred residents. We tried to distribute the
occupations, arts and skills as evenly as we could. Yellowstone is Portillo’s,
Banff is Jorgenson’s, Washington took Cimarron and Claire has Rocky Mountain.”

And she smiled wearily.
“Shenandoah is mine.”

“Paolini stayed in Marathon?”

“He seems to have the
toughest skin.”

He nodded, looked down at her
hands.

“Celine, everyone else at
Sandman One is dead.”

Her face became stone.

“We were afraid of that.”

“Have you heard from 3?”

“Nothing.”

He sighed.

“The IAR succeeded, Cece.
They made people, living, breathing people with thriving civilizations.”

“With their experiments.”

“Yes, with their experiments.
The people I came over with are not animals. They’re friends. They saved my
life. I owe them.”

She sat back. “You’ll never
convince them of that here.”

“Maybe I can’t, but you can.”

“They’re probably dead by
now, anyway. The creatures they keep in the compounds are horrific. Gruesome
caricatures of animals. Monkeys, bears, sloths, snakes.” She shuddered. “Have
you ever seen a deer with fangs?”

“I’ve seen a few horses with
‘em.”

“And the rats—“

“Don’t talk to me about
rats,” he grumbled. “But remember, that was Tuur Oewehand’s work, his
monkey/rat hybrids. That has nothing to do with my friends.”

She studied him, her eyes
small and sharp.

“This is a different world,
Jeffery.”

“More different than you
know, Cece. That woman, Damaris Ward, she believes that the air has been
poisoned somehow, that people can’t leave this compound without turning into
beasts. You know that’s not true. You know it’s just the success of the IAR.
It’s engineering, Cece, not epidemic.”

“Modification, not mutation.”

“Exactly. Out there, the air
is sweet, the land is bountiful. It’s a very good place to be.”

“Perhaps so, but we’re still
starting out. It takes time. People need time.”

“But start it right, not with
lies.”

“Well, I suppose we’ll never
know how you would have handled Europe then, since your entire compound was
lost.”

She turned and moved her
hands across a console and five screens began to hiss and flicker.

“We’re using up all the comm
time for this, Jeffery. There are only three working towers on the entire
continent. We only get an hour a week. It’s been bloody hard…”

As one by one, the human
faces of his colleagues from centuries past appeared on the screens, he
couldn’t help but think about his feline colleagues. He missed them more than
he’d expected and prayed that Damaris Ward would find them not only quickly,
but alive.

***

Kirin shook his head. This tale
of Ancestorland was growing worse with the telling. Perhaps his brother was
right. Perhaps this journey was worth the danger. Perhaps there was only one
way to stop this threat to their way of life. Perhaps the dogs would listen.

He cast his eyes across the fire
to where the young dog was staring at him, brown eyes hostile still.

Kirin sighed. Perhaps they would
all die in the Year of the Cat.

It was late and the Alchemist
had started a fire. She was humming and the baby was cooing happily on a skin
while tea was steeping. Bo Fujihara’s aromatic pipe carried over even the
woodsmoke, rich and heady in the cold night air. Soldiers had finished
stripping the village of the last of the tents and the resources had been
distributed amongst the few wagons that accompanied them. It was a strange and
quiet moment, the hush before the rumble of a storm.

The night was filled with the
sounds of restless horses and wind and two thousand
Chi’Chen
practicing
hand-to-hand combat by the lights of many fires. The fighting was fascinating,
he thought as he watched—hands and feet, arms and legs and even tails all
moved like striking serpents. They fought with grace and honour, for when a
match was won or lost, a very respectful bow was given and received. There was
a crowd gathering around one pair, both members of the elite force known as the
Snow, and he shook his head. Their blows were lightning, so swift that he could
barely follow their movements and he realized it was an art form. Like
Jujutsuh
or
Kenjutsuh
or even his own Bushido. They were skilled beyond
skill, trained beyond discipline and he found himself approving. He was certain
his own troops could not fight like that.

He looked back to the fire and
the teller of stories.

After this last installment,
Kerris had curled up, head in Fallon’s lap. She was stroking his hair and
whispering to him. Kirin watched them with a growing ache in his chest. He
wondered if it were fear or jealousy. Neither one would be a welcomed companion
on this journey. Perhaps he was simply missing Ling. He had not read her letter
and he wondered at that. Perhaps he did not know what to think of the fact that
Sherah al Shiva had borne him a son and they both were here, around this very
fire. It was a strange and surreal thing.

It was a strange and surreal
night, he realized, this night in a ransacked foreign village. Strange and surreal
and sad, so he rose to his feet and left the fire, contenting himself to watch
the monkeys.

The other half of the Magic were
sitting together around another fire under the flaps of one of the gars. The
Seer, the Monk and the Oracle were not holding hands for a change, all equally
exhausted from their morning spent working on the Shield. The wound in Sireth’s
chest had begun to ooze once again from the exertion of the trail, but Ursa was
preoccupied with the army so he sat cross-legged in the tent, eyes closed in
meditation and healing. Nevye and Setse were watching the
Chi’Chen
exercises just outside the flap, their eyes fixed on the poetry of motion and
martial art.