The Defenders
Pasha tugged his sister up from where they’d hidden under Bora lake and watched the bizarre scene play out. Her face was round, with a small mouth and wide set, slanted eyes. She was a child—not even thirty, yet—but she looked even younger. Tears mingled with fishy lake water, now black and grey with ash. Her silver eyes looked blue in the Eyelight.
Anna sucked in a breath, released a shuddering sob.
Pasha pulled her close so his body would smother the sound of her crying. His own face was gritty with soot, concealing the thick scar that ran from his right eye to the corner of his mouth. Through the blur of his own tears, he watched the shaggy, white monster scuttle toward where the other creatures had settled by the lake, far from the rest of the invaders who’d set camp just beyond their village. “I know, I know.”
She turned her head away from him to watch the creature move away but said nothing.
“I think they saw us,” he answered his own question lurking at the forefront of his mind. “I’m sure of it. The old man looked right at us after he threw up. The little fat man pointed and said something, and the old one killed him. Then they left.”
Anna pulled away from her brother and sniffed. “What are you saying?” They were the first words she’d spoken since he’d started the fire.
“I don’t know.”
Anna pushed him away. Why would he save us?” Her words trailed away.
Pasha was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know. And why did the man he killed burn when he hit the ground? It’s not that hot.”
Anna didn’t answer, but stood for a minute, waist deep in the lake, looking off towards where the creatures had gone. Then she spun around and shoved her brother, hard. “And you killed everyone else.” the sobs came, louder.
Pasha pulled her close again. She resisted, but with weak effort, and he held on until she stilled, willing his tears not to join hers. I’m seventy-five now, he repeated the thought, over and over again. I’m seventy-five. But he didn’t feel seventy-five. He felt like a child who’d just lost his parents.
“You know why I set the fire,” he said into her wet hair. “They came to open the Tomb. We had to stop them. We had to try.” And we were so close, he thought. But we failed. The night winds had come, swept the inferno up the valley just as he’d been taught they would, but it hadn’t killed all of them.
Anna struck his chest but didn’t answer.
“Even father said we did the right thing.” But at the thought of their father, their mother, of everyone else, the dam holding his tears cracked. They stood in the lake for a long time, holding each other and crying.
Anna pulled away first.
He wiped his face, smearing ashes into his eyes and making them burn. “They came from outside the valley.”
“That’s impossible. There’s no one left,” Anna whispered.
“We were wrong.”
He thought back to what his father had said after Pasha had told him he’d set the fire. “We haven’t failed. We’re here, so we haven’t failed. That’s why he sent us to the lake while everyone else…” He trailed off, and they both fell silent again.
After a while, Anna asked, “What do we do now?”
Pasha had already thought about that. “We can’t stop them from getting into the Tomb now. They would just kill us. But we can hide. Look for others. There must be someone left.”
“What’s the point?” She whispered. “All we’ve ever done is guard the Tomb. Pretend to guard the Tomb. If they open it, take whatever’s inside, what’s the point?”
Pasha swallowed. Pretend. For hundreds of generations, the people had guarded the door set into the Wall behind Suedmal from a world that wasn’t supposed to exist. Worthless guardians, he thought. All this time. Every one of us. The ashes in his mouth tasted bitter.
“We can follow them, Anna. Us, and whoever we can find. We’ll follow them, take back what they stole.”
Their father’s foundry was only a quarter span from where the invaders had set their camp, but the entrance was hidden, the chimney in the middle of the blackvine patch, which was now impenetrable with the coils of fired thorns that wouldn’t grow again until spring.
The boiler pit was cold and dry. They huddled together in the blackness, waiting for dawn.
Daylight revealed itself with a single, muted shaft beaming down from the chimney hole in the middle of the round chamber. The boiler sat in the center—a single slab of obsidian carved into a bowl with the furnace beneath, where their father had boiled blackvine for three days until it turned soft as clay. Against one wall squatted the kiln, and next to it, the smooth block of volcanic glass where he had beaten the softened vines into shape before being fired. Along the walls, de-thorned rolls of blackvine cluttered, and on the lone stone table opposite the tunnel entrance lay an array of finished tiles, tools, and weapons.
Their father had claimed to be the best blackvine smith in the valley, and no one had ever disputed it that Pasha had ever heard, though he suspected all the smiths made such claims to their clans. Now, though, his forge seemed ramshackle and cold, it’s spirit flitted away with the life of the man who’d spent over two centuries there working his craft.
They stayed at the forge for two days, gnawing on strips of dried bora meat and watching the shaft of light slide from west to east. Towards midday the first day, there was a low, resounding boom that echoed back and forth against the Wall around the valley, rolling down through the chimney hole, making the coils of blackvine stir. A few trailers of dust sprinkled from between the stone blocks of the walls. Anna and Pasha squeezed each other close. There was nothing to say. The invaders had breached the Tomb.
In the afternoon on the third day they left the safety of the forge after Pasha collected two long blackvine knives, thin and curved, from his father’s worktable. Rain had washed through the night before that neither of them had noticed, dampening the ground, making it stick to their moccasins and clearing the air of ash, but it still smelled like smoke.
“We should look for survivors,” Pasha said.
Anna wiped her face with the back of her hand and didn’t answer.
They stood together at the narrow trail that led up the side of the mesa to Suedmal. Clouds had moved in, squeezing through the lower valleys of the western Wall like glaciers, making the sky featureless and dull. He didn’t want to go back to Suedmal. He didn’t want to see what had been left behind. He didn’t want to voice his fear to his little sister, either, so he said, “Alright,” and they continued up the path together. Towards home.
The grey smell of smoke wasn’t enough to drown the stench wafting from Suedmal as they climbed the path. Anna gave a quiet little cough and pulled her vest over her nose. Pasha gave her a questioning look, but she only shook her head, and they continued on.
Animals filled the street. Rats scattered, and mourner birds took flight as the siblings crested the bluff. A family of bora rooted and gnawed at something near one of the longhouses. Revenge for a millennium of their kin being drowned in the lake below for leather and meat. Their heads swung as one towards the siblings, smooth black hides glittering in the filtered sunlight. The female’s tusks jutted out and forward from the back of her lower jaw, curving upward. They were as long as Pasha’s forearms. He drew his knives and struck a low defensive stance, wishing he’d taken a flat-spear from his father’s forge, but she just snorted at him and led her family away to the south, unhurried. Silence returned to the village as the crunch of their hooves died in the distance.
Limbs, fragments of gnawed bone, shattered skulls with eyes pecked out by the mourners, and blackening piles of flesh were all that remained of their clan. An end to the eternal struggle to lay claim to Suedmal, the sacred village closest to the Tomb.
The invaders had tried to set the roofs of the longhouses on fire. They’d clearly been unfamiliar with blackvine and had abandoned their useless torches where they lay on the tiled roofs. Instead, they’d directed their monsters to tear the structures apart, to limited success. They’d collapsed every house, and Pasha watched with tears in his eyes as his sister tried to dig through the rubble of their home until he pulled her away. Their parents wouldn’t be there, anyway. Their father would have been with one of the first failed assaults a day or more to the north beyond Bora lake. He’d gone out the same night Pasha had told him he planned to set the fire for the night winds to carry up the valley, and had never returned.
And their mother—he forced himself to finish the thought, willing himself to anger—their mother would be out here, somewhere, in Suedmal’s lone street, reduced to bones or a blackened pile of flesh. Food for hornets.
“Come on,” he whispered. “Let’s go. There’s nothing left for us here.”
She let him lead her away.
They made their way down the backside of the mesa and then up again, though a little stretch of forest untouched by the fire, though it was blanketed in ash, the green only uncovered by their footprints.
At the base of the trail that led up past the tree line, she halted and grasped Pasha’s hand.
“Wait.” Her voice was soft but free of the quiver that had been in it since they’d hidden in the forge.
Pasha stopped and turned to face her. “What is it?”
She said nothing at first. Pasha waited, absentmindedly running a finger back and forth across the scar on his cheek.
“Maybe we shouldn’t go,” She blurted.
Pasha sighed, but before he could respond, she spoke. “Why is it okay to go there now? We know they took something. Isn’t that enough? Why do we have to break the second law?”
He faced her, surprised to see her dark eyes sparkling. Not with tears, but what? Curiosity. He pressed his lips together and ran a finger across his scar again, studying her face. She wanted to go. She was looking to him for a reason not to.
Find the old man, and they would find whatever he’d taken, whatever had lain at the end of the path they now stood on. But Pasha wanted to know what they’d been protecting, too. He wanted to see what was so important that the Ancestors left his people to protect it, entombed in the mountains for an eternity that had ended four days ago.
His sister must have seen something on his face that told her all she needed to know. “It’s okay. Never mind. There doesn’t need to be a reason.” She took his hand, and together they climbed the path toward the Library.
They stood, staring at the ruin in the long twilight, each stranded by their thoughts. Pasha, about the first time he’d come here, brought by his father in the ancient ritual of adulthood less than a year ago, to show him all that the people stood for. Anna, about how her adulthood had come early, and how meaningless it was, now that it was too late.
The white door lay forty hands away from where it had been set in the Wall, its bottom resting on a black boulder, while the top of the thick disk had sunk into the mossy ground. A passage led down into darkness. A scuffling of footsteps in the dust forged a path into the shadows. Rubbish left by the invaders lay strewn to the side of the opening.
Anna broke the silence. “Let’s go.”
“We need light.”
Anna walked over to the pile of foreign junk and poked through it. She pulled out a cage of bent brass and broken glass and held it up.
“This is one of their lights,” she said. “I saw their camp.”
“It’s broken.”
Anna examined it, standing beside her brother. “The wick is sticky. I think it’ll work for a little while.” She struck her flint next to the cage, and the wick inside lit with a soft, bluish glow.
She walked toward the opening in the Wall without waiting to see if Pasha was following.
He hesitated for a second, then followed his sister into the passage.
The tunnel led straight into the Wall for a hundred paces before ending in a large, round chamber, the back half collapsed sometime in the distant past. What looked like glass tables and a few rows of featureless white boxes, made of the same material as the door, were arrayed around the room. On one side, half-buried in rubble and black stone, was a machine full of triangular holes. Shards of broken crystal were scattered in front of it. If any passages had once led from this room deeper into the Wall, they’d been entombed by the c for centuries.
The siblings stood in the center of the chamber. Pasha wandered over and examined the crystal shards near the collapsed wall and wandered back again. Neither of them could think of much to say. The faint blue light from their ruined lamp was fading, and they started back towards the distant light of day.
“There’s no reason we should understand it,” Anna said as they reached the opening.
“No,” Pasha agreed. “Those broken crystals, though. The invaders did something with them. Took them out and smashed them?”
Anna shook her head as they stopped together in the fading daylight at the mouth of the tunnel. “Why would they come here just to smash something nobody was going to find? I think those were already broken, so they left them behind.”
“And you think that’s what they took? The unbroken… whatever they were?”
“Maybe.”
Pasha nodded. “Maybe you’re right. We need to find out. Follow them and see. If they didn’t find anything, we need to know that, too.”
Anna studied her brother, but all she said was, “Okay.”
“We’ll go down a little way and camp,” Pasha said. “Tomorrow we’ll head north. We’ll find other survivors, figure out what to do next.”
“I want to leave the valley, Pasha,” Anna stated, her voice quiet enough that the tunnel behind them seemed to drink the sound of it.
“I know. We’ll go,” he said, pulling her into a hug she didn’t resist. “North, then, to find where they came in. We can look for others on the way. We’ll learn the truth. We have to. How else are we going to return what they stole?”
If Anna had any thoughts on that, she didn’t share them.