A Town Called Dust: The Territory 1 (24 page)

Sister Rosie looked at Lynn with steely eyes. “You had better be careful, girl,” she said.

“Why?” Lynn said. “What are you going to do to me? Nothing the Church isn’t already planning. I’m not scared of you. Churches are supposed to be places of hope, but all you use is fear.”

Lynn knew as soon as she’d spoken that she’d crossed the uncrossable line. Why did she always do this? Why did she let herself speak out against those it was dangerous to speak out against? But then that was the point, wasn’t it? She thought that if she didn’t speak, no one would.

“Do not think the situation excuses blasphemy or crimes against the Church,” Sister Rosie said. “The Holy Order shall be summoned to take you into custody.”

“No!” Squid said, before calming himself. “I’m sorry, Sister,” he said, “it’s just that all this has been very hard on us. We’ve just been through a battle and now this with Darius. I’m sure Lynn didn’t mean what she said.”

Sister Rosie looked from Squid to Lynn. “It is a trying circumstance,” she said, “of that I have no doubt. But the law is black and white, and you have spoken out against the Church.”

Lynn readied herself to reply—she was going to ask what the Church was so afraid of—but the mayor spoke before she could.

“Sister,” Mayor Rust said, “you know there is no one in Dust more dedicated to the Church than I, so I hope it is with that in mind that you let me speak for Lynnette. By returning here, she and Squid and the bitten boy Darius have likely saved the whole town by warning us and by leaving men to protect it.”

Sister Rosie looked at Lynn. “Do you recant your words?”

No
, Lynn thought,
I don’t recant anything
, but then she thought of Squid risking himself by standing up for her and she thought of Darius lying in that small wooden room and she said, “Yes, I’m sorry. I take back everything I said, Sister Rosie, I was just scared. Praise be to the Pure.”

“Praise be to the Pure,” the Sister intoned. “Although it is highly irregular, I will let it go this once. You have one warning, and one only. Do not blaspheme again or you will go up on charges.”

Yeah
, Lynn thought,
because it’s going to make a lot of difference in the long run
.

“Praise be to the Pure,” the mayor said. “There is still the worry of what to do about Darius.”     

“I can’t leave him to die alone,” Lynn said. “I’ll stay with him until the end.”

“And when he turns?” asked Sister Rosie.

“I’ll do what needs to be done.”

That night Lynn kept vigil beside Darius’s bed. They had tied his hands and feet to the four corners of the bed as a precaution but he hardly roused at all. Sometime before midnight, as Lynn felt her head dropping forward in sudden lurches, she was startled awake by the opening of the door and the chilled night air hitting her face.

“Wha…?” she said.

“It’s me. I couldn’t sleep.”

Squid came into the small hospital and sat on the arm of Lynn’s chair. Lynn dropped her head to the side so that it rested against Squid’s bony arm.

“I never hated him,” she said. “I wish I could tell him that.”

“Me neither,” Squid said. “You know what I think?”

“What?”

“I think he was scared.”

Neither of them spoke. They just continued to sit at Darius’s side long into the night.

When Darius began to move Lynn was startled into a heightened state of awareness. She wasn’t sure whether she had been asleep or awake or somewhere in between, but now she was definitely alert. She realized that Darius was groaning, soft gentle moans, something between the creak of a slowly moving door and the sound a dog might make while dreaming. It was an inhuman sound. Squid still sat in the chair beside her, resting against her, breathing through his nose in the long breaths of sleep.

“Squid,” she said, nudging him with her elbow, “Squid.”

Squid moved, adjusting his head and opening and closing his lips a few times, disturbed, but still, it seemed, in the depths of sleep.

“Squid,” Lynn said, elbowing him again, a little sharper this time.

As his head flicked to the side with the force of Lynn’s prod, Squid’s eyes opened and he rubbed them with his fingers hard enough that Lynn could hear the squelching of his eyeballs in their sockets. “What?” he said in the voice of the freshly woken. “How is he?”

“I think he’s turning,” Lynn said.

On hearing this statement Squid too was ultra-alert. He leaned forward, listening. Darius’s deep, labored breaths were raspy as the air grated through his bone-dry throat.

“Darius?” Lynn said.

The dehydrated body that lay on the cot, the body that may or may not have been Darius Canum, didn’t reply, at least not verbally. He moved. He moved the smallest amount, rolling his face toward them. He began to move his jaw, open and closed, as if testing that it worked. Then his eyes locked onto Lynn. Staring back at Darius, Lynn saw that his pupils were large, leaving only the smallest halo of color around them, and they were clouded over with a white film, as though he were looking out through a mist. Darius’s mouth opened in an extended O and he let out a throaty hiss that Squid and Lynn immediately recognized as the sound of a ghoul. Squid moved backward as fast as he could while scrambling to his feet.

“He’s changed,” he called to Lynn. Lynn was already grabbing the shortsword that had been lying on the ground beside her. They had both known it would come to this. As they had sat and watched Darius slipping away they had known there was no other possible outcome, but now that it was happening some part of Lynn still couldn’t believe it. Could she really behead Darius?

Darius was arching his back, trying to rise from the bed, pulling against his bonds in the jittery motion of a ghoul. The bed shook with each pull Darius made with his arms and legs.

As Squid backed away, Lynn was moving toward him, the sword held out to her side, ready to bring it arcing through Darius’s neck. Darius stood without moving.

“Darius,” Lynn said, “Darius, it’s us.”

Lynn squeezed the handle of the sword. Darius was looking in her direction. Even through his dim white eyes she could tell he was staring at her, although it felt more like he was staring through her. He began trying to move toward her, snapping his jaws in her direction, his head tilted to one side. There had to be some part of him that was still human, Lynn thought. Surely some part of Darius was still in there.

“Darius!” she said, as if hoping that saying it loud enough might snap him out of whatever trance he was in. “You’re Darius!”

Darius’s struggle intensified. He thrashed on the bed so violently that the rope tying his right arm came free. He lunged towards Lynn and she felt his fingers grab the front of her shirt. She struggled to free herself as Darius managed to pull his other arm from the rope too, leaving, Lynn noticed, even in her panicked state, some of his skin on the rope.

Lynn lifted the sword as Darius lunged at her with both hands but realized too late that she couldn’t do it. She wasn’t going to be able to swing the sword. If there was a part of Darius left in there she couldn’t kill him. He was going to grab her and bite her and there was nothing she could do about it.

With a sudden jolt she felt herself pushed aside, torn from Darius’s grip. She fell awkwardly and looked back to see Squid standing where she had been, right within arm’s length of Darius. Darius pulled back for a moment, loading himself up like a coiled spring, and then lunged. Darius fell onto Squid, his legs twisting as his feet were still tied to the bed. Squid slammed backward, landing on his back with Darius on top of him. Darius
’s
 hands wrapped around Squid’s arms, holding them to the ground. Darius was angry, so angry. His dry, pale face was twisted with an animalistic rage.

Darius’s face was close to Squid’s as he screamed, the hollow dry scream that Squid had heard so many times during the battle. Squid could feel Darius’s breath over his face, cold and dusty and already smelling like ashes as if his insides had burned away to nothing.

“Darius,” Squid said as calmly as he could, “are you really in there?”

Darius turned his head to the side and cried out again. He arched his back and rose up, opening his mouth wide. Squid felt Darius’s fingers push against his face, forcing his head to the side, opening up his neck for a bite. Darius’s fingers were dry and rough on his face. He tried to struggle but Darius was too strong. Darius began to plunge downward toward his neck, open mouth ready to suck the moisture from Squid’s body.

There was a gurgling noise as Darius hit him. Squid squeezed his eyes shut and waited for whatever pain would come with the end. Then he felt Darius’s face roll off his neck and the weight of the boy’s body land on top of him. When he opened his eyes Squid saw Darius’s headless body. He pushed it sideways and it fell away like a limp rag doll. Darius’s head had landed on the floor and his eyes were looking at him. Standing over him was Lynn, shortsword in hand. Hot tears welled in her eyes.

“He asked me to do it,” Lynn said after a moment. “I should have done it sooner.”

Squid realized he was staring at her with a look of horrified bewilderment on his face. He lifted himself into a sitting position and ran his fingers back and forth through his thick crop of black hair.

He swallowed a fist-sized lump in his throat. “He wasn’t in there, Lynn. All those people who become ghouls. They’re really gone.”

When he opened his eyes everything was black. So black that he wasn’t sure whether he had actually opened his eyes or not. He reached up to his face and felt his eyelids twitch under his touch. His eyes were definitely open. It was just dark. Not the kind of darkness you can sit idly in, but the pressing kind of darkness that sinks into your pores, darkness that creeps into the furthest places of your mind, darkness that makes your heart flutter with anxiety.

He shifted the weight on his backside from one bony cheek to the other. There wasn’t much room in this place to get comfortable. Below him he could feel the unmistakable texture of wood, floorboards nailed down with their edges packed so tightly together that not even a single beam of light could find a way to squeeze through.

He held his hand in front of his face, bringing it closer and closer, straining to see it, but even as he felt his palm touch the end of his nose he couldn’t make it out. It was like the darkness had stolen every part of him. He was just a mind floating alone. Maybe, he thought, this was what happened when you died. Maybe some people were left like this, stuck hanging between life and death. For a moment he admitted that maybe he deserved this end, running away like he had done. But that was a fleeting thought; he was the most promising graduate the Academy had produced in years, after all. It would have been irresponsible of him to have done something as foolish as getting killed.

“Hey!” he called out. It wasn’t the first time he had done so but it was worth trying again. “You should know that I’m a Digger, Trooper Melbourne Hermannsburg of the General’s Guard. Keeping me hostage is not wise. I have no doubt that you shall be hunted down and feel the full fury of the Territory’s finest.”

He was somebody’s prisoner. That much he was sure of. Who exactly his captors were was a little less clear. He had escaped certain death at the hands of the ghouls only to be taken prisoner. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t feel guilty about leaving the general and the other Diggers behind, but they had certainly been killed. It was better that at least one of them survived to bring news of the attack—essential, even. He would be able to return to Alice and tell the tale of their gallant battle and narrow defeat at the hands of the enemy. He, of course, had battled on gamely and only just managed his own escape. It was only right that as the top graduate of the Academy this was how it would happen. He was certain that no one would find a reason to question that story. As a hero in the making, it was only fitting that it be him who outlived even the general himself.

Melbourne felt as though he was leaning against bars. They pressed into his back, cold and hard, on either side of his spine. Suddenly a voice like a rotten apple spoke to him.

“There’s food and water at your feet.”

Melbourne felt around in the darkness and his fingers closed over, and half into, a tin cup of water. He raised it to his lips and drank greedily. Next to it was a torn-off chunk of bread that he tried to eat quickly but found it difficult to swallow down his dry throat and instead had to slow down and take smaller bites. A few minutes later there was a flash of light. In that moment Melbourne saw that he was in a cage covered over with heavy cloth as if he were an oversized pet parrot. A dark hand, the fingers of which wore several gold rings, placed another cup through the bars.

“Keep drinking,” the voice said.

This was how it had been since he had first awoken here. He had been sitting in the darkened cage and occasionally a hand would put bread or water in front of him. Sometimes it was a gloved hand, white and tattered; sometimes it was a small hand like a child’s, but usually it was the dark hand with the gold rings. It had been days now, he thought, maybe weeks, sitting in the darkness, and none of them had spoken to him except for a quick word for him to pass out an empty cup or plate.

“I said,” Melbourne called out, “that you will face the full fury of the Diggers!”

“I don’t think he’s heard, Captain,” said the voice that went with the rings.

“Ay, Yellow,” said another voice, deeper but not as rotten. “Doesn’t seem like he has.”

He had never heard his captors having a conversation before. Now they spoke loudly, clearly wanting him to overhear.

“Heard what?” Melbourne said.

“He seems to have recovered well enough,” said the ring-fingered man. “We should probably just let him know.”

“Know what?”

Then Melbourne’s eyes nearly flew back into his head as he was struck by bright light. He instinctively clamped his eyes shut to stop the sting.

“Careful, matey,” the deeper voice said, “you’ve been in the dark for a while.”

Slowly, when he felt the sting diminishing, Melbourne tried opening his eyes again. He had to close them two or three times before he could even hold them in a squint. As his eyes adjusted, the scene around him came into focus. He was indeed in a small cage. He could see the black cloth that had been draped over it sitting in a heaped pile on the ground. Not ground, he corrected himself, but deck. His cage was on the deck of a ship. Above the deck was a billowing air balloon, the entire ship held beneath it like a mouse in the talons of an eagle. He could feel the cold wind moving past his face. He was on the dirigible he had seen.

Around him people were busy tying this rope, pulling that one or untying something else. He could hear the creaking of wood as the ship sailed through the air. There were people climbing the structure above like monkeys, flinging themselves across the rigging. But it was the two people in front of Melbourne’s cage that drew his attention. One was tall and wide shouldered, standing lopsided, resting most of his weight on a gnarled wooden cane. He had a red beard braided into thick tufts and identical-colored hair on his head, wild and unkempt beneath a black, curved-rim hat. He wore a red coat, black breeches and large black boots. The smaller man beside him was dark skinned with a broad nose and thick lips. He wore a piece of once-white cloth tied at the corners over his short-cropped hair. Melbourne shot a glance at the man’s hands. His fingers were covered in thick and thin, shiny and tarnished, jeweled and plain golden rings.

“Haven’t you heard?” the little man said in the same wet accent Melbourne had heard through the dark. “Rumor has it the Diggers are gone.”

“That’s why we sail inward,” said the man with the red beard. “With the Diggers gone we should be free to pillage and plunder.” He smiled a black-toothed smile. “We are pirates, after all.”