A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1 (22 page)

Lynn looked toward Squid. He still stood staring at her.

“Squid,” her voice dropped into pleading, “I’m sorry. The Diggers don’t let girls join. I had no choice but to pose as a boy. I’m still the same person.”

“You’re not the same person,” Squid said, “because you’re not Max.”

“I am Max!”

Squid was a little shocked to hear the volume of Lynn’s voice.

“Do you think it matters whether I am a girl or a boy!?” she continued. “I can do anything a boy can do!”

Squid stared at her. He supposed it didn’t matter at all. In fact, part of him felt happy about this. If he was ever going to have a girl friend—not a girlfriend, he didn’t think he’d ever have a girlfriend—but if he was going to have a friend who was a girl, then he was glad it was Max, or Lynn.

He should tell her it was fine, that she was still his friend. He knew he should let his anger go but he couldn’t; the sense of betrayal had gripped him too hard right now. Everyone he’d ever known except for Darius and Max was dead or had been turned into a stumbling lifeless husk. He didn’t even know whether he liked Darius and now Max wasn’t even who he’d thought he was.

Squid could see the tears in Lynn’s eyes. “Yes,” he said as he turned and walked toward the shapes of the engineers’ trucks, which waited some distance away. “It matters.”

Lynn stood and watched Squid walk away. Then she looked back toward the battle. The ghouls were milling around the dead, trying to suck all the moisture they could from the scattered bodies, almost fighting each other to get at what was left.

“So what are we supposed to do now?” Darius said.

Lynn was quiet for a moment before she turned to him. “We head back to Dust. There’s nothing we can do here.”

“They’re just going to keep coming.”

“Their numbers have been depleted,” Lynn said, “so the Territory should be able to mount a defense.” Though she wasn’t sure whether she believed her own reassurance.

“They’re all dead!” Darius yelled. “The Diggers are all dead. We are the only ones who got out of that disaster alive!”

“Yes, Darius,” Lynn said softly. “I know. I was there too.”

Darius stood and stared at her. He turned to look at Squid, who had not stopped walking. Lynn gathered Cadbury and gave him a quick check over. When she declared that he was fine she took him by the reins and she and Darius began walking after Squid.

Squid said nothing when they caught up to him. When they reached the engineers, most of them were sitting around the trucks smoking from long-handled pipes. Lynn approached one of them, a tall, thin man whose wide-brimmed hat was pulled down close to his eyes, which were filled with devastation. Lynn asked him quietly if they could ride with his bio-truck back to Dust and with a grave nod the man agreed.

Lynn signaled for Squid and Darius to come over. The three of them climbed into the back of the bio-truck as it roared to life, and watched the driver work the controls, a large wheel, a series of levers and some pedals on the floor. The driver adjusted them intermittently and the pitch of the engine’s drone changed each time. Squid seemed intent on understanding the way the truck worked; Lynn guessed it was a good excuse not to have to speak to her or Darius.

It took them until dark to reach Dust. They could see the lamps and fires burning in the windows in the distance, as if the town was a beacon of light, guiding them in. It was, Lynn realized, all too much like the Territory itself, clustered together, shivering, alone and cold in the dark.

The Administrator stood facing the large window in his bedroom. He stared at the city of Alice spread out below like a jumbled-up jigsaw, a scattering of stone, rusted metal and wooden pieces that didn’t seem to fit together.

“All of them?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Knox Soilwork, “all of them, with the exception of support staff and engineers.”

“Are we sure?”

“Three First Apprentices made it back to Dust during the night. We received word by telegraph this morning.”

The Administrator plucked at the three-day growth that grew short and sharp from his chin. This couldn’t be happening. The attack should have worked. Colonel Woomera had agreed. The horde should have been smaller. They should have been further away. He felt a tightness in his chest and bile rising into his throat. What had he done?

He found himself looking at the Wall in the distance, the structure that had once protected the Ancestors from the ghouls, the boundary between the Alice Inside and the Outside. Of the stretch he could see, much of the top had collapsed or been pillaged over the years so that it looked like a giant mouth had taken bites from it. Huge cracks, wide enough to walk through in places, had opened between the great stones it had been constructed from, some reaching from the top of the wall to the ground. It needed repairing. They may need that wall again.

“I want the Apprentices brought to me,” the Administrator said.

“I have already sent the reply,” Knox said, “though it will take them some time to return.”

“Call back all Workmen and engineers and inform the Holy Order we will need whatever men they can spare in defense of the city. Also I want you to task the Stonemason Guild with evaluating the Wall. I need to know what it would take to repair it.”

“Of course, Your Honor.”

“And Knox,” the Administrator said, turning from the window to look at him, “does the High Priestess know?”

And because things had a way of happening like this, at that moment the door to the bedroom opened. It swung wide on its hinges and hit the wall with a bang. Standing in the doorway, with a face devoid of anything but scorn, was High Priestess Patricia. Her pointing chin was thrust forward, her kitten-killing gaze taking in the room. She had a thick book under her arm.

“High Priestess, this is highly inappropriate,” Knox Soilwork objected. “This is the Administrator’s bedroom.”

“Hold your slithering tongue, Soilwork,” the High Priestess said. “You may leave us.”

Knox Soilwork took a deep breath and stood up straight, his feet together so that he was like a black tree that had taken root in the floor. He turned his long neck to look at the Administrator expectantly. The Administrator gave a small, almost imperceptible nod.

“Your Honor, surely—” Knox Soilwork started, but the Administrator cut him off.

“Thank you, Knox,” he said, “that will be all.”

Knox Soilwork looked from the Administrator to the High Priestess. He sucked in a heavy breath through his nose and tightened his lips. Clearly seeing that neither would change their mind he walked from the room, having to turn sideways to fit past the High Priestess. She turned her head and watched him walk down the corridor before she shut the heavy wooden door behind her.

The Administrator stood, plucking at his chin, while the High Priestess watched him. She seemed to be calculating exactly what to say, or perhaps she was just trying to hold in the torrent of angry abuse that threatened to spill forth. She ran her long, yellowing fingernails through her taut gray hair, which was pulled back, as always, in a bun.

“Your Honor,” she began, “I understand that you, against the wishes of the Ancestors and the word of God, sent the entire force of Diggers to their deaths. Your wish for your own glory and your prideful need for a historic battle has endangered the entire Territory.”

“High Priestess,” the Administrator said, “may I be frank?” He kept his expression bland. He would not give her the pleasure of seeing the guilt that burned inside him.

The High Priestess moved to sit in a green-cushioned high-backed chair in the corner, placing the large leather tome she carried gently on the floor beside her.

“What else can we be in a time like this?” She indicated a matching chair positioned a short distance away and facing the chair she sat in. “Sit, Your Honor.”

“I’d prefer to stand, Your Holiness,” the Administrator replied.

“As you please,” the old woman said, crossing her long legs.

The Administrator found himself thinking, not for the first time, that she would have been attractive once. Those long legs would have drawn some sinful looks from her congregation. Every time he had this thought in her presence he felt uncomfortable, as though maybe she knew what he was thinking.

“What do you wish to be frank about?” she said.

The Administrator looked at her for what he hoped would be a slightly uncomfortable amount of time. “You and I both know that the Ancestors do not speak through you. The command of the Central Territory’s military forces should rest with the Administrator. I sent the Diggers to do battle with our enemy on the advice of my military advisor. It seems the information we received from the boundary riders about the size and location of the horde was wrong. Still, the Diggers have at least scattered the horde somewhat and perhaps slowed it down. A smaller force would only have been destroyed with less to show for it. Now our attention must turn to mounting another defense. Perhaps the Holy Order can assist us.”

The Administrator said this with as much confidence as he could muster, but he knew that the horde would regroup and eventually, bolstered by the numbers of the dead, it would move towards Alice.

“I do not know that,” the High Priestess said.

“Surely you can see we must turn our attention to a new plan.”

“That is not what I am saying,” High Priestess Patricia said. “I am saying that I do not know that the Ancestors do not speak through me. My entire life I have felt the presence of something greater than us in the world and I have been guided by what I have believed this presence has wished. That, Your Honor, is the Ancestors’ voice. Even you could hear it if you listened.”

The Administrator felt his patience thinning. “If you are not here to berate me for the destruction of the Diggers, then why in the Ancestors’ curse are you here?”

What was the old crone waiting for? He wished she would deliver whatever punishment she had come to deliver and let him get on with figuring out how to clean up this forsaken mess.

“It is true that through disobeying the word of God you have broken the law,” the High Priestess said, “and personally I would like to see you brought up on charges of treason for your idiocy. But my life, like yours, exists for the protection of this Territory, and now is not the time for such measures. The punishment for your folly will come, but for now I am here to tell you a story.”

“A story?”

“Yes,” said the High Priestess, “a prophecy of Steven.”

The Administrator sighed.

“I think you will find this one interesting,” the High Priestess said as she picked up the book she had carried with her into the room. The book’s pages had been marked with so many silk ribbons and tassels over the years that it looked as though it wore some unfortunately colored party wig. As the High Priestess opened the book some loose pages moved and she gently pushed them back into place. Patricia ran her fingers through the book’s wig until she found the marker she was searching for, a dirty red silk ribbon, and she opened the book to the page it marked.

“Prophecy 12:1,” the High Priestess said, looking up at the Administrator. “Perhaps you should sit.”

The Administrator glared at her for a moment, ready to defend his right as ruler of the Central Territory to make whatever decision he wished about whether to sit or stand, but decided in the end that it wasn’t worth the effort and sat in the chair opposite her.

“This is late in the life of Steven,” the High Priestess continued. “It is widely accepted that as he got older his prophecies looked further into the future and with more clarity than his earlier ones.”

“I suppose it’s easy to say that he had clarity when a prophecy is so far in the future that no one would be around to see whether or not they came true,” said the Administrator.

The High Priestess looked at him for a moment before continuing. “Three boys survived the Battle of Dust?” she said.

“That’s right,” the Administrator said, “First Apprentices.”

The High Priestess cleared her throat with a gentle noise. “Prophecy 12:1,” she repeated, and then read, “
And so it was that Steven, he who led us to Alice, lay in his bed and was old and frail. And he spoke unto those of his followers who had gathered and said that this would not be forever. One day, as he had always said, we would take back the lands to the East and the West and the North and the South and that we would live beyond the walls and further. Then Steven said unto those of us who listened, ‘I know how this will happen. I have seen it in my dreams. There will be a great battle between men and the infected, one in which all will die but three. Of those who live a boy will be the bringer of the end of the Reckoning.’
”

“It could be coincidence,” the Administrator said.

“It could be,” the High Priestess said, “but I do not believe it to be so.”

“Why have I never heard a prophecy of Steven that speaks of someone who brings the end of the Reckoning?”

“There are some prophecies that are not widely known,” the High Priestess said. “It is thought best that they are kept quiet.”

“The knowledge of a prophecy about the end of Reckoning would bring people hope; isn’t that the job of your order?”

“He is spoken of again later,” the High Priestess said, ignoring him as she gently turned two pages of the book. The pages were yellowed and thin and they cracked and popped in a way that suggested they might tear at any minute. “Here,” she said eventually, “Prophecy 13:13.
And it is in the east that he will find the vaccine that will end the days of Reckoning.
”

“The east; is he speaking of Big Smoke?” asked the Administrator. “And what is a vaccine?”

“The Prophet Steven refers to Big Smoke in other passages about the east, so it is our belief that he is speaking of Big Smoke here also,” the High Priestess said. “We do not know what a vaccine is, but the Church believes it to be some kind of weapon.”

“There doesn’t seem to be any reason why this should be kept secret,” said the Administrator, his voice ruffled by anger.

“There is more,” the High Priestess said, beginning to read again. “
But the End of Reckoning will come with great loss. Alice as we know it will be destroyed.
”

The Administrator looked at the High Priestess. “Alice will be destroyed?”

“You realize why this was kept quiet,” said the High Priestess, closing the book. “I would like to be present when these Apprentices return. We must ensure that they do not go anywhere. By no means should they be sent into the east. It is my suggestion that they be dealt with so that we won’t have to worry about them at all.”

The Administrator eyed the High Priestess without saying anything.

“And my other suggestion,” the High Priestess said, “is that you get started on repairing our Wall.”