The Seekers: The Children of Darkness (Dystopian Sci-Fi - Book 1) (15 page)

Orah started the next morning with a hearty breakfast. They
had food enough for only two days, but one extra serving would make little
difference, and they’d earned a decent meal. She doled out a double portion of
meat and flatbread to her friends, but ate less herself, offering the remainder
to Thomas. When they finished, they filled their water skins from the falls and
set off.

The day progressed without care except for the second verse,
which she analyzed constantly. “The first part’s obvious. We’re looking for a
man-made cave high up on the hillside to our right.”

“So you told us,” Thomas said. “Five times.”

“I’m trying to fathom the rest, the part about the snake and
flying.”

“Don’t worry so much,” Nathaniel said. “For six weeks, we’ve
faced each step as it comes. Wait till we find the cave.”

“I know, but I like to be prepared, especially when giant
snakes are involved.”

Then she’d recite the verse again.

The trek to the falls had taken the predicted eight days.
According to the rhyme, they should find the cave after one more day, so by
late afternoon, she hardly flinched at the sight of a man-made tower looming
ahead.

“
To the East, towering o’er the lake
,”
she announced.
“Below is the lake and here is our tower.”

The stone tower rose some sixty feet and, like so much of
the old civilization, was crumbling with age. She scanned to its top and saw at
once what lay there—a platform forming the entrance to a cave. She shifted her
gaze, cupping a hand over her eyes to filter the glare, and studied the far
side of the river valley.

After a moment, she drew in a sharp
breath and pointed. “Look there.”

The others followed her gesture. To the west, hundreds of
paces away, lay a mirror image of the tower and cave.

Thomas scrunched his nose and rubbed the stubble of his
scraggly beard. “What do you suppose that means?”

She smiled her I-know-the-answer smile. “It means the old
masters had few limits. The vicar of Bradford described an age of innovation
and genius. We’re looking at one of their miracles.”

“What’re you talking about?”

“They must have built a road to cross the valley, suspended
between the two towers. The tunnel cut through the mountain on the far side and
reentered here.”

Thomas gaped at one cave and then the other. “Impossible. A
thousand men couldn’t build such a thing.”

She patted his arm. “Before we’re done, Thomas, we may have
to redefine impossible.”

Once the friends got over their wonder, she turned her
attention to the next challenge: how to scale the tower. She discovered iron rungs
embedded in the back side of the stone, the lowest within Nathaniel’s grasp, but
when he tried to pull himself up, the rusted metal broke apart in his hand.

The two of them studied the problem, debating solutions,
while Thomas circled the base.

At last he spoke up. “I can climb it.”

Orah stopped mid-sentence. “What did you say?”

“I said I can climb it. The bricks on the outside may have crumbled,
but they left holes to a solid core. The rungs have rusted, but the fasteners remain.”
He scanned the length of the tower, and he nodded to himself. “I know every
hole and fastener I’d use. Once at the top, I can secure one end of the rope and
drop the rest down to help you two up.”

Nathaniel eyed the tower and then Thomas, letting the idea
sink in.

Orah checked the angle of the sun. “All right, we’ll try it your
way... but not now. Too dangerous so late in the day.”

“But—”

“I won’t start now, Thomas. We’re already tired, and if we
have a problem, we’ll be solving it in the dark. Better first thing in the
morning, especially with a giant snake at the top.”

***

Early the next morning, Orah regarded the tower and pondered.
Elders long gone and with extraordinary powers had laid out this path, but what
if the seekers had taken too long to emerge?

The tower offered a good example. Had the seekers come sooner,
they could have used the ladder to climb up, but now success depended on the
agility of a nimble seventeen-year-old.

Thomas coiled the rope around his left shoulder, leaving his
right arm free, and headed to the base.

She followed uneasily.

He grinned. “Move aside. You won’t be able to catch me if I
fall, and you’ll only get hurt.”

Her eyes widened. “Maybe we should find a safer way.”

Thomas winked. “Stop worrying. This’ll be easy.”

He jumped on Nathaniel’s shoulders and stood exactly as he’d
done with a different tall boy years before at festival. After steadying, he scampered
up, using the grooves in the stone and the fasteners of the ladder. In less
than a minute, he reached the top.

He waved to his friends, attached one end of the rope to a tree,
and lowered the rest.

That morning, Nathaniel had tied a series of knots in the
rope. He now used these to ease his ascent. Though not as nimble as Thomas, he
was stronger, and with the aid of the handgrips soon joined his friend.

After he’d hauled up the packs, he signaled for Orah to
follow.

She gave a skeptical tug and started
off, but with Nathaniel anchoring the rope, the climb turned out to be easier
than expected. Still she breathed more easily when he locked hands with her and
boosted her up to the platform.

The feeling of relief passed quickly once she assessed the
entrance to the cave. It had straight walls that rose as tall as a Little Pond
cottage before curving into a perfect arch—clearly made by men—but inside, no
light entered. No matter how much she squinted, she could pierce the darkness no
more than a few paces.

They’d need torches. She prompted the others to gather dry
brush, and then bound them to green branches with twine. After a longing gaze
at the bright expanse of the river valley, she lit a torch and plunged inside.

Walking became difficult. The rocky surface within the cave
crunched underfoot, interrupted by solid planks raised high enough to trip her.
After a while, she realized the roadbed was made of timbers buried in gravel at
regular intervals. To speed her pace, she needed to skip from plank to plank, a
normal gait for Nathaniel, but one that required her to stretch unnaturally. Even
so, she soon mastered the rhythm and was loping along.

After a time, she was struck by the sense of sameness. The
walls, the ceiling and the distance between timbers remained the same, no
matter how far she went. The rhyme had been specific about the length of the journey
so far, but made only a vague reference to the cave. She’d assumed its passage
would be brief. What if she had misunderstood? They had water for two days,
food for one, and the cave offered nothing but dust and gravel. When their
kindling ran out, they’d be cast into darkness as deep as a teaching cell. If she
believed the primary precept of the Temple, that the sun was the giver of life,
this place could become their tomb.

She needn’t have worried.

Since they entered the cave, their torches had cast flickering
shadows on the walls and the ceiling above. Now, suddenly, firelight scattered
in all directions. She stood not in a cave but a large chamber. Torchlight
reflected off metal signs overhead, most rusted, but some with numbers still
distinct enough to read. On either side, she detected vague shapes, shadows in
the darkness.

Nathaniel suggested they fan out, but she refused, reminding
him of the giant snake. She turned to her left, only to bump into a chest-high
wall. The right was the same. She advanced twenty paces and tried again. No
change. The walls were not walls at all, but the sides of a trench between
platforms.

Nathaniel picked one side and hoisted Thomas up. After he’d
explored a bit and declared the footing solid, the others joined him.

Once on top, Orah paused to listen. She heard no sound but the
echo of their rushed breathing.

She moved on, maintaining a straight line until blocked by a
wall. The flickering light from her torch revealed bits of tile covering its
surface, most intact but for a few fragments that had broken away.

“Thomas, come closer,” she said. “There’s writing here. Hold
my torch up with yours so I can see better.”

As she rubbed off the grime with the flat of her hand, a
blackening appeared against a white background. “It’s the start of a word.”

Thomas brought the torches closer, and the biggest letter P
she’d ever seen came into focus.

She took the skin from her pack and began dribbling water
over the next letter.

Thomas grabbed her hand. “What are you doing? We have little
enough as is.”

She jerked away and kept pouring. “It’s a message from the
keepmasters.”

Her skin ran empty just as the words became clear.
Please
mind the gap between the platform and the train.

“What does that mean?” Thomas said.

“I don’t know, but it might be important like the rhyme.”

“Or it may be ordinary, a simple everyday message.”

Orah’s eyes narrowed. “The keepmasters did nothing ordinary.”

“I hope you’re right, but I doubt it. Unless they were gods,
they were ordinary most of the time, like the rest of us.”

She had no time for bickering—the torches were burning low—so
she swept her flame across the chamber and was rewarded with a flicker in
response. “Over here.”

The others rushed to her side and stood with torches in a
row. The firelight reflected off a huge shape ahead. She shuffled forward, hand
outstretched, until she touched the object’s metallic skin. Its rounded sides
stood as tall as a man, and extended some distance in either direction.

“I think we found our giant snake,” she said.

Thomas edged closer but stopped an arm’s length away. “Is it
alive?”

“No. It’s a creation of the keepmasters.”

Nathaniel ran his fingertips along the dusty side, then rapped
on its surface with his knuckles. “For what purpose?”

“Remember the road across the valley?” Orah said. “This
looks like a wagon that carried lots of passengers.”

“Then why would the keepmasters call it a snake?”

“Maybe they feared we’d forget its name, so they used a
timeless shape instead.”

Thomas finally mustered enough courage to brush the metal
with his fingertips. “How can you be certain this is the snake of the rhyme?”

“
Two doors to the mouth of the snake / Inside, you must
enter and fly.
Think, Thomas. The rock face wasn’t a cliff, but a boulder
in the shape of a man’s head. Why couldn’t the snake be a long round wagon? And
even though ‘fly’ means to soar like a bird, we use the word in other ways.
What did the elders say after you won a race at festival?”

Thomas grinned. “‘That boy can fly.’ All right, maybe the
snake’s a wagon. So let’s find its mouth.”

They wandered along trying to find its entrance. Doors on the
side would never be considered a mouth, and all had rusted shut.

She worried the kindling would run out and they’d be left in
the dark. “We don’t have much time. Where would a mouth be?”

“In the front, of course,” Nathaniel said, “but which direction
is that?”

“Not where we’ve come, I hope, or these wagons will really
have to fly when they find no bridge across the valley. Let’s check the far end.”

No longer afraid of some monster, she agreed to split up so
they could more quickly check each wagon. Once alone, she felt the small hairs
on the nape of her neck tingle as her world shrank to the pool of light from
her torch. Luckily, the shouts of her friends soon echoed across the chamber.

“Nothing on this one.”

“None here either.”

Then Nathaniel called out, his words resounding above all. “I
found something, different from the others. Its front is more... like the head
of a snake.”

Orah and Thomas ran as fast as they dared in the dim light, until
they joined him at the far end. All three gawked at their find. This wagon
was
different, newer and undamaged by time, and the luster of its translucent skin amplified
the light like the surface of the scrolls. Most importantly, a hatch lay at its
tapered head.

Had they found the carriage that would bring them to the
keep?

Thomas broke the spell. “We don’t know how to get in, and if
we did, we wouldn’t know how to make it go.”

“Believe,” Orah said. “Believe in the keepmasters.”

She brushed her fingertips against the surface, and it responded
with a hum. She jumped back, but the wagon did not fly. Instead, it stirred
slowly as if waking from a long sleep. The interior began to glow and in a few seconds
became bright as day. The humming grew louder, and the hatch lifted, rising
gracefully until it exposed a doorway wide enough for four people to enter
abreast.

Thomas fell back a step and eyed the hatch, then peered
inside without coming any closer. “It’s magic.”

“Yes,” Orah said, “but not temple magic. We’re witnessing the
genius of the prior age. When something’s the work of the keepmasters, anything’s
possible, and now, they’re inviting us in.” She dropped her torch and entered. “Well,
what are you waiting for?”

Thomas hesitated, but seemed unwilling to let Orah be braver.
He squared his shoulders and stepped inside.

Nathaniel snuffed out his torch and
followed.

The interior held rows of padded chairs of the kind that
would have been appropriate around a Little Pond fireplace, but there the
similarity ended. Had they come with two hundred seekers, all would have fit.

They sat in the nearest seats, facing the front. After days
of travel and hours of wandering in darkness, they took the chance to savor the
light and rest. For several minutes nothing else stirred. Then, just as
smoothly as the hatch had opened, it swung shut. The hum grew louder, approaching
a roar.