Tale of the Thunderbolt (25 page)

“Come, come, Valentine, Victo. Walk with me in my gardens. Bring your giant guardian, if you wish. Francier, look to our guests, would you? Take them to a well, and let them pick their desire from the orchards.”

Some of the sailors elbowed each other as they admired the lithe Haitian girls.

Valentine jerked his chin, and the gesture brought Torres forward. “Keep the men out of trouble,” he said, before joining the Kurian. Ahn-Kha sang out a few orders to the Grogs and followed.

Legba made his way, slowly and painfully, to a bleached stone bench in the garden. Victo and Valentine each took an arm and helped him sit. Haitian girls, all muscle and gleaming smile, ran to his aid from the well, bringing water.

“Thank you, my children,” the old Kurian said.

“You know what you are called up North?” Valentine asked.

“No. I'm sure my former cousins settled on something outrageous.”

“The ‘Once-ler.' It's from an old children's book by a man named Seuss.”

Papa Legba shook his head. “I haven't heard of it. I don't read much human work. Some Dostoyevsky. A few lines of poetry, perhaps. I know a little Baudelaire.”

Valentine watched it drink.

“So Kurians do live off of something other than fear and death,” Valentine said.

“Yes, we eat. Though not as much as a human.”

“The people here are so strong-looking. I was expecting a bunch of half-dead skeletons. I thought you were just taking their vital aura in doses rather than all at once.”

“It is a hard thing to explain, Valentine. You know all life creates aura, even single-celled organisms. To a certain extent, this aura is also projected, just as your body gives off extra heat. The healthier a body is, the more it throws off. I'm able to live off this part of the aura, though only just. It is a bit like osmosis. I have to be careful when I sleep, however. I was napping in a grove some years back, and when I woke, the grass was dead all around, and I had killed the tree shading me.

“It has not been easy, no. And again no. Perhaps it can be compared to giving up a drug addiction. Except the body does not recover after healing itself of the need for the drug. I live with it, fight with it, every day. A real physical need, like starvation, not the psychological one so familiar to those who give up a habit. I can control myself while awake, but in my dreams, Valentine, in my dreams. When I sleep, it is six thousand years ago, or thirty, and I swill myself into a coma on the sweet screaming auras of your kind.”

Legba's appearance flickered for a moment, and Valentine got a glimpse of multipupiled eyes, but the black face returned, licking its lips. “Why does evil have such strength? The thoughts, they grow on you in a way that virtuous deeds do not.” Papa shut his eyes for a long moment, and his face became as false as a death mask. He opened his eyes again.

“My children, I've seen evil not just at its birth, but at conception. I was on the councils when we first began to learn from the
Anciens
about the secrets of aura. I spoke for scientific inquiry, for reason, for knowledge. What harm lay in facts?

“Harm, indeed. It had been so long since our race knew evil, it was as though we had regained the innocence of your Eden. Though the weight of the Opinion went against us, we did not fail in our resolve, so we met in secret. We pieced together what we could, supplemented the rest with our own formidable science that had researched aural energies. We called the others
Dau'weem
, which has no precise translation in French or English. The closest I can come is ‘back-thinkers. ' We were the
Dau'wa
, the ‘forward-thinkers,' and held ourselves superior.

“It would be easier to lay the finger on one evil being. Say that this
Dau'wa
pushed us into what we became. But it was not so simple on Kur. We were scientists interested only in truth, and we were ready to subvert the Opinion even at the cost of our lives. The arrest of a
Dau'wa
galvanized us, and we began to plan against the day when there might be a more widespread persecution. We planned escape routes to other worlds, began to talk of weapons and plots. Sure enough, some of us, purely in the interest of science, tried out our theories on plants, animals, and finally a sentient. I remember the first time I fed on a sentient, some trembling wide-eyed creature from a long-nighted world of rock and ice. I consumed one and then another, and found that each aura was richer, as the terror in their pounding hearts mounted, knowing what was coming. I developed a taste for it.

“Some of them fought. We learned — what you would call the hard way — that it could be dangerous to drain the food ourselves, we turned to intermediaries, using our own DNA as well as others, to design the creatures you call Reapers. It took us ages to get the connections right, to get our animating guidance flowing out and the auric channels to us. In the midst of all this, we were unmasked. It was heresy on such a grand scale, I think the councils were unsure of how to handle it. They dithered, and we acted. Some fled to other worlds, including yours, and tried to carve out niches where we could live in hiding. A few recanted, but the rest of us used our avatars as weapons. We told ourselves lies, that it was us or them, justifying any tactics. They had forgotten war, but we took to it with a will, and our skill waxed.

“Kur was ours. During the battle, we made the most terrible discovery yet. A
Dau'weem
has the richest aura of all, like nothing we had experienced before. We began to openly boast of being connoisseurs of death, and we hunted our brothers up and down the tunnels of Kur.

“That proved to be a mistake. Had we pushed our advantage at that time, we could have owned every portal in the Interworld Tree. But we were like pirates who, having seized one ship in a convoy, immediately drink ourselves into insensibility on the contents of the wine chests, forgetting all the other fat prizes to be had. When the orgy of death ended, we found ourselves shut off from the rest of the worlds. The Doors were shut, permanently it seemed.

“The
Dau'weem
's strategy would have worked. We
Dau'wa
might have stayed trapped on Kur, gnawing at it until the world lay lifeless, and then turning on each other at the last. But the
Dau'weem
forgot that Kur was the library of the
Anciens.
We learned to live off minimal supplies of aura in that long dark time, thousands of your years. I found, somehow, that growing gardens, thriving fish, and happy sentient life could give me enough to exist. I guarded my estate, for there was no honor among us
Dau'wa
where auric energies were concerned. I even killed for it. We despaired of ever opening another door when we discovered an intact portal from one part of Kur to another. It was like having both halves of an equation, we realized how to go about it, and we began to open doors. Not to worlds with many of the
Dau'weem
, but to worlds rich in sentient life. Like yours.

“I believe you are familiar with the rest of the story.”

“So you kept living off the living, so to speak?” Valentine asked.

“No, I slipped into old habits, like an addict who tries just one more injection for memory's sake. We took life from your world, consumed it, and I joined in with the rest. When the time came to make the move here, I was in the vanguard, so hungry for a world of fresh auras, I forgot that I could do with less. But we did it right, we laid our groundwork well, found allies amongst your own people — imagine a bull offering some of his cows to the meatpacker — and when the time came, your dominion collapsed easier than we had hoped. Of course there was error. Our earthquakes sank islands and coasts we had meant to leave intact. The viruses we used to break down your social order were more lethal than we planned. But perhaps it was to our advantage, after all. In many cases we came as saviors, not as conquerors.”

“It's been done before.”

“Yes, from what I've read, your race is adept at exploitation.”

“Can you tell me one thing about the
Dau'weem
?”

Papa Legba looked into his eyes, but Valentine avoided the stare. Locking eyes with the Kurian was too much like sharing his mind from the inside.

“Yes, young Valentine?”

“Did they make us? Humans, I mean.”

“Made you? I doubt it. You're too flawed. Shaped you? Perhaps. They needed the equivalent of our Reapers, you must remember, something to do their fighting. Both the
Dau'weem
and the
Dau'wa
are too canny to fight through anything but proxies.”

“I had been told you were just bad at it.”

“Bad at it? Are we? Who owns your planet, young Valentine? Or more important, from your point of view, that is — who keeps the
Dau'wa
from controlling all of it?”

Valentine felt a hot flush come to his face. “As long as we're talking about weapons, you're supposed to have one. I've come a long way to get it. I trust it's not just smoke and mirrors.”

“You've seen it already, from a distance, Valentine, though perhaps no one told you. But I'll show you the source.”

 

Papa Legba walked down a grassy hill, into a stand of taller trees. Victo and Valentine helped him down the path. The trees stood in a ring around a hollow, a bowl-shape in the landscape. A spring trickled out of a rocky overhang and fell into a rill that emptied into a pool.

“There are many springs in this area. Some of them run beneath the floor of the great house, a natural cooling system. Though this climate is to my liking. I was always too cold when I ventured outside in the cooler lands.”

They entered into a pine woods. The trees had the twisted, tortured look of timber that grows on a windy coast, and short needles, like those on a balsam fir. The wind-warped limbs of the tree extended in the direction of the prevailing airs like a woman's hair blown in the wind. Ahn-Kha ran his hand over the needles and grimaced.

“Strange sort of pine, my David. The needles are like thorns.”

Valentine touched the bark; it was smoother than most pines, more skinlike. It made him think of the beeches of the north. The smaller branches had thorns growing on them.

“It isn't pine, Golden One. It is quickwood, to translate it into English,” the Kurian said. “This is your weapon.”

“Trees? You can't — ,” Valentine began, then fell into a stunned silence.

“This is what you came to find.”

All the miles, all the risks, for a stand of timber.
He stifled a hysterical laugh. “Quickwood? A tree is the new weapon against Kur? Okay, walking through a thick stand would be like walking through razor-wire, but that's not much of a weapon.”

Papa Legba nodded. “You are almost right. The
Dau'weem
don't think like men, you must remember. They create organisms to do their work, not tools. Quickwood takes different forms, and there is a variant that grows into thorny hedges.”

“A hedge? Do you know how big a hedge we would need to keep the Reapers out of the Ozarks?”

“Where is the famous Valentine patience? You've no doubt already fought the Reapers. Why are they so hard to kill?”

Valentine called up his ugly memories. “Well, they're strong and fast, for one. They're on you before you can bring your gun up. Even if you put a few rounds into them, those robes they wear slow the bullets, and if you do get flesh, that black fluid turns gummy when it hits the air, they never bleed to death. Then there's their skeleton — ”

“That ‘gummy fluid,' Valentine. Their circulatory fluid. They use it to transport oxygen as you do, though inside them it stays as liquefied as your blood. Quickwood has chemicals in it, in the sap and pockets in the thorns, to be precise, that act as a catalyst. To you it is an irritant that makes you itch. To one of the Reapers it produces an effect similar to that which happens when they are wounded and the blood is exposed to atmosphere. When it enters their bloodstream — ”

Valentine made the mental leap. “Holy Christ!” he said in English.

“Yes, but it kills them much faster than the wooden cross killed your prophet. It is most effective if the wood is still living or recently cut, the results are nothing short of spectacular. But even wood that is older, as long as it has some residue that gets brought into contact with their ‘blood,' will prove lethal.”

“Why is it here? Why haven't the Lifewe — the
Dau'weem
planted this stuff everywhere?”

“That is a story that would be worth telling, if anyone were in possession of the whole tale. It was grown on another continent, long ago. Quickwood was used in the first incursion against us. By
us,
I mean Kur, of course. A few tens of generations after the victory, your people knew only to worship these trees, and in the intervening millennia, even that practice faded. I imagine the trees were turned into huts or firewood. Once harvested, it does burn exceedingly well and makes fine charcoal.

“The next part of the story takes place in the shadowy years as Kur again opened doors to Earth. A
Dau'weem
named Sen living on Earth, or I should say who was trapped on Earth, for the
Dau'weem
had closed all the doors and destroyed the connections as best they could. Sen learned of the new one that had been opened here in Haiti. He tried to reveal himself to certain authorities, but was branded a heretic and threatened with death. With a few of his followers, he searched throughout Central Asia, hunting not for treasure or lost cities but for this kind of tree. They found some survivors, and not without a great deal of difficulty managed to get it to this island, where they thought a great battle might one day be fought against Kur.