Strangers (19 page)

The door swung open. Yellow light spilled out across the packed snow. Two silver-robed Cian technicians emerged from the tunnel, carrying one of the oblong boxes between them. They set it down near the other boxes, talked together in low voices for a moment, their breath steaming silver and blue in the bright light from the tunnel, their spindly backlit shadows stretching out into the barren winter country. Then they went back inside. The door closed. The light went out.

Farber tobogganed down the slope on his butt, kept sliding when it leveled out—on his back, feet helplessly in the air—as he had built up too much momentum to stop, and ended up inside a snowdrift. He got to his feet, slapped snow from his clothes, and came cautiously up to see what he could see. There was, he noticed, a faint trail leading back from the cleared area before the door, and winding away to the north and west, into the remote, winter-locked hills. It was hardly more than a path trampled in the snow, but Farber was willing to bet it was used to pack the boxes out, by centipede probably, or by some other big draft animal. He broke from the drifts onto the packed snow, and stopped to listen for an alarm. Nothing. Nervously he padded up to the boxes, and knelt by one of them. He ran his hands over it, exploring, picking up splinters from the wood. He tugged experimentally at the lid. It was nailed down, apparently, but not too tight. Abruptly, he decided to risk it. He dug his fingers in under the lid and found purchase for them. He took a deep breath, held it, and seemed to swell like a puffing toad. His big hands tensed, his wrists arched, his shoulders bent—there was the crisp sound of splintering wood, and the lid flew open. He swayed above the box, panting for breath. The two brightest moons had risen, hurtling up the sky like meteors—-they cast a dim lactescent light over the evening snowscape, but it was still hard to see, and the shifting double shadows they caused compounded the problem. Farber squinted, then, gingerly, he reached into the box and rummaged around. His hands encountered something smooth and hard—it rolled under his touch, he groped for it, got it again, and lifted it quickly out of the box and up into the light.

It was a skull.

Farber grunted, as if he had been hit in the stomach, and dropped it. The skull hit the packed snow with a chitinous
thunk
, spun, and rolled leisurely away into the shadows. The world pulsed and time stopped—Farber hanging in suspension, his fingers outstretched as they had been when he dropped the skull, while a decade went by, a century, a millennium—then pulse, and time started again, the world tilting and whirling around his head as he wrenched his whole body back and away so that he sat down heavily on his heels, shaking his hand convulsively as if he had touched something very hot, screwing his eyes shut and instantly opening them again. The spasm passed, and the world stopped spinning. He put his hand to his throat, put it down again. “No,” he said aloud, in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice. He discovered that he was grinning, involuntarily, mirthlessly, grinning with horror. At the same time, a distant part of himself was saying,
You knew what it would be
, dispassionate, unafraid, and not at all surprised. He blinked. Then, grimly, he reached back into the box. Brittle dead things, rustling, rolling things that scuttled under his fingertips. A cold, unpleasant texture.
Like porcelain
, he thought inanely. Bones. Ribs, vertebrae, finger bones, femurs, a pelvis.

He scrambled over to the next box—scurrying along on hands and feet without bothering to straighten up, like a crab—and wrenched it open, heedless of noise, hitting it a savage, splintering blow with the palm of his hand when a nail stuck, the lid rising into the air with dreamlike slowness, as if it were a butterfly, and then, suddenly fast, clattering away end over end. There was now a long splinter wedged painfully under his fingernail, but he ignored it. Recklessly, he reached into the box and scooped out a double armful of its contents. Yes—bones. And more bones. He froze again, face turned up to the sky, squatting grotesquely with his arms full of brittle white bones, like a ghoul caught gathering firewood. There was an odd, dangerous vacuum inside him, waiting to be filled by the panic and horror he knew were there, insulated from him as if by a thin layer of glass. Calmly and patiently, he crouched there in the dark, waiting for the glass to break.

Behind him, the door made a loud ratcheting sound.

The glass shattered. The vacuum filled. Before the light from the opening door could even spill out across the cleared area, Farber was off, dropping the bones and springing away in a single enormous bound, like a startled cat. Three strides took him to the edge of the packed snow, up the icy slope then—scrambling straight up it with hands, feet, knees, elbows, fingernails—and he was running and plunging away through the drifts, battering and bulling his way forward, floundering, falling, snowplowing, almost swimming through the snow as he breasted it. Up again. A hoarse shout behind him, and he ran faster, snapping his knees up as high as he could with each stride to get his feet clear of the snow. Then his feet bit air. He fell from the drifts to the surface of the road, hit jarringly, rolled, and came up running. Fortunately, when he came up he was pointed south, in the direction of Aei, because he was in no condition to navigate. His mind had whited out under an overload of panic and superstitious terror. But his body had orders to run as fast as possible, and, to it, the hard, dry pavement underfoot and the sudden release from the encumbering snowdrifts were a benediction. He ran.

Somewhere in the smothering night behind him, there was another shout. Already it was faint with distance, diminishing, left behind.

Farber kept running anyway.

17

Afterward, Farber was unable to remember much about the trip back to Aei. Cold, jarring motion, darkness, the stars doing a stately jig around his head, the rasping sound of his breathing loud and ugly to his own ears. He ran or dogtrotted most of the way, occasionally slowing down to a walk when he was blown, but running again as soon as he got his wind back. He didn’t look behind him. Sometimes he would miss his footing in the dark and fall—rolling with it if he was lucky, rattling his teeth and cutting himself on pebbles and grit if he was not—but always he would scramble up again immediately and keep on. He ran because it was the practical thing to do, a defense against the amazing cold, but he also ran to stay ahead of the horror that ghosted along at his heels like a vast black shadow, stopping when he stopped, watching him without eyes, following after again when he ran, patient and indefatigable.

Somewhere just outside of Aei, it caught him, swallowed him in a single velvet gulp, and he was
thinking
again, the thoughts scribbling themselves unstoppably across the blank slate of his mind. My God, how could he tell Liraun! She wouldn’t believe him. How could she believe him? How
could
he convince her, how could he make her see through the monstrous deception that had been perpetrated on the women of her race for—Christ, hundreds of years? Millennia? How many victims, across all that gulf of time? The horror and pity of it squeezed his heart. Think of them, the countless millions of women who had gone unsuspecting to be slaughtered, consenting happily to the rituals without realizing where it would lead them, believing the pious lies of the butchers. And then the Birth House, the door closing behind, the sudden terror and shock, the knives. Slaughter. The ignoble burial in the secret hills. And all because of some dark superstition, some god-haunted paranoia, some murderous holy flummery! The pastel lights of New City were winking languidly ahead, and feverish and shivering, he ran madly toward them.

At the junction of the North Road and River Way, he took his last and hardest fall, skidding down the steep slope on his stomach for about thirty yards, embedding gravel deeply in his hands and face. The impact stunned him for a moment, and he lay peacefully on his elbows in the dark, breathing raggedly. When he lifted his head, his eyes were drawn irresistibly across the low roofs of Aei New City to the towering obsidian cliff that rose up out of them—such an imperative upsweep that it eventually sucked all vision to itself, wherever else you tried to look—and then—head tilting back to take it in—up the column of glistening black rock to the cold stone place at its top. Old City of Aei. As he stared at it, he underwent a swell of such profound and complex emotion that his vision blurred, and Old City danced and shimmered on its cliff.

Then he was walking through its narrow, secret streets. Black rock, high walls, shuttered doors. Along the Esplanade, up Kite Hill.

The Row. His own house, orange light leaking from the windows. As he made his way up to it, the door opened and Jacawen came out.

The two men stopped, and stared at each other. Then Jacawen closed the door behind him, and walked slowly forward. Until now, Farber had felt panic and terror and dismay, but he had not had time to get angry. That caught up with him now, in an enormous wave of detestation and rage, as he watched the small, somber figure ghost quietly toward him. It was all the fault of the ones like Jacawen, the Shadow Men, with their feculent darkness of spirit, and their hard, pitiless, flinty minds. They were the ones who wanted to take Liraun from him and destroy her. Jacawen stopped walking—they were almost nose to nose. Bristling, they locked eyes, each instinctively circling a step or two to the other’s left. Jacawen’s eyes were intense, sober, unflinching. Farber had to clench his fist hard to keep from striking him. But he could not hold that brilliant, agate-hard gaze for long; against his will, his own eyes flicked uneasily aside. As they did, Jacawen calmly said “
Hatatha
, greetings to you.” Farber made a sullen reply. Jacawen nodded politely, and started walking again. Farber pushed himself against the wall to let him go by, the thought of touching him suddenly amazingly repugnant. Farber turned and slammed into the house.

Liraun looked up from a chair, saying, “Joseph—?” Then she stopped. Farber’s clothes were grimy and torn, he was scratched in a dozen places and there was dried blood on his face. He looked ghastly. Liraun stared at him in amazement.

“What was he doing here?” Farber demanded.

“My husband—”

“What was he doing here?”

“I don’t understand,” Liraun said. She got painfully to her feet. “You mean Jacawen?”

“Yes. I don’t want him around here, and I want to know why he was sucking around when I was gone. You understand?”

“But—” She made a bewildered, tentative gesture, almost taking his arm but letting her hand drop before it could touch. “He was here,” she said, more firmly, “to make the arrangements for my Procession. I will go to the Birth House tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Farber said.

“That is why I was alarmed when you didn’t come home,” she said, boring into his sudden silence. “You see? My time is very close now. A few days perhaps,
në
? They will not let me wait any longer. But Jacawen will take care of it all, pay for it all as a birthday gift, we won’t have to worry, and we have until the morning. Joseph—” stopping and looking at him in a frightened, plaintive way, not understanding him. “You are my husband. I wanted us to be together. Joseph—”

Farber groped behind him to find a chair, and collapsed into it. All the rage and bluster had gone out of him. He looked sick. “Liraun,” he said, heavily.

“What is it?” she cried, immediately becoming even more alarmed.

“My God, Liraun,” he said. His voice was flat and dull. He sat there like a stone, growing more sodden and inert by the second, while Liraun hovered apprehensively nearby. He raised a heavy dead hand to ward her off, then tangled it clumsily in his hair, saying, “Christ, how can I tell you!” Liraun instantly said, “What’s wrong?” and Farber, not hearing her, overpowering her, at the same time said, “But I have to. We’ve got to face it.”

After the tangled words, there was a moment of silence. He looked at her as if he was really recognizing her for the first time that evening. “Sit down,” he said. She stared uncertainly at him, shrugged, and moved back to her chair. She sat down. Another stretch of silence then, with the feeling under it that his spirit was swimming back from some deep place. He firmed himself up, grimly, almost visibly. “Liraun,” he said, “I want you to try to understand this, and try to believe me. Okay? I know it’s not going to be easy for you. But I’m not going to let it happen to you. I’m going to protect you.” Liraun, impatiently: “Joseph what—” but he cut her off, waving her to silence, saying, “
Listen
, goddammit.” A nervous silence, then, plunging in to get it over with: “Liraun, try to understand. If you let them take you to the Birth House, you’ll never come back. They’ll kill you.”

“I know,” Liraun said.

Blankness, then he ran the program again: “No, baby. Listen to me—you’ll die. You’ll be
dead
.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Oh,” Farber said stupidly. His face went dead again.

“Joseph,” with a hint of agitation, “do we have to talk about it
now
? Why—”

“Wait a minute,” slowly, bewilderedly, floundering, “you mean you know?” He stared at her helplessly. Then something else rose up in his face. “My God! Oh my God!
You knew all the time.
”

She said, “Joseph, please.” And he said, “You didn’t tell me!” simultaneously.

They stared at each other wildly, like things at bay.

“Joseph—”

“Why didn’t you tell me!”

Totally bewildered now, and beginning to cry: “But I did. I
have
—”

And that stopped him cold. Maybe she had. When she talked philosophy, he seldom understood much of it. It was so easy to get lost in a maze of allegory and indirection, so much was oblique and subtly implied. Maybe she had. But— He had risen to his feet in his passion; now the strength drained out of him again, and he fumbled blindly for the chair. He couldn’t find it—he stood in a daze, making pathetic groping motions with his hands. His mouth was working weakly, without sound.

For the first time that he could remember, Liraun was crying openly.