The Mirror After the Cavern Read online

  She closed her eyes, and her expression changed. “Aahh,” she murmured. Her baby grunted, and she switched it around from one breast to the other. She looked at him with a look that almost made him believe she felt sorry for him, not for herself.

  “Are you alone?” Peyten asked.

  “There’s a squad with me. They’re waiting outside the village,” he answered again.

  “I love her,” Peyten had said, apropos of nothing.

  “I’m glad I was able to give her birth, to see her. I love that I got to do this,” she nodded down at the child, and at her own body.

  “You’re not going to take Seemie too, are you?” there was suddenly alarm in Peyten’s eyes. “Don’t take her. Let me leave her with my sister. There’s a woman who will be her wet nurse.”

  “I was sent to track down just one person,” Tella answered. It was the truth. He didn’t see any need to bring the baby back to the palace. It would be odd to imagine a baby as part of a harem. Of course, a harem was an odd thing to imagine itself. Tella hadn’t ever known of such things before he’d traveled to Seemla.

  “You can leave the baby here,” he agreed.

  “How soon do you expect to leave? Do I have some time? A few days?” Peyten asked hopefully.

  It was a question Tella couldn’t answer. He hadn’t expected to make contact with her on that first visit inside the village borders. But he had. And he had to take her in. The Contract was in force.

  “I can wait until tomorrow. I’ll go back and tell the squad you’re out in the woods, and on your way back,” he decided, and blurted out. He liked the woman. Her eyes were intelligent, and she was attractive beyond anyone he’d ever known back home. Tella couldn’t picture the things the prince had written about her, and he blushed.

  “You won’t try to run will you?” he asked. “I’ll find you. It’ll make me look bad if you do.”

  “Thank you. I’ll be here. I just want to have one last night with her,” Peyten had looked at him gratefully.

  Tella nodded his head. He stood silently, confused, for a moment more, looked at her, then nodded again, and left the cabin.

  He was infatuated with the woman. In just a matter of moments of conversation, the woman he was under Contract to bring back had entranced his interest.

  He had to obey the Contract. The village survived on the Contract. He’d never violate his promise to take the woman – Peyten, she had a name – back to the prince at the palace. But his pride in having a perfect record of capturing his quarries was tarnished.

  “Your turn to hide, Silas,” Forna’s voice broke into Tella’s attention. Forna was Tella’s sister’s daughter – his niece and Silas’s cousin. She was a competitive, driven child. She pushed Silas from time to time, and it probably wasn’t a bad thing. Silas was a bit of a daydreamer. His mother, Rheme, claimed that he was like her grandmother in that sense, the grandmother who had come to the village from the outside world, a rare outsider who had settled into the village and married, raised a family and been content, and fit in.

  Forna wasn’t always popular with the other children in the village because of a bit of abrasiveness in her manner. But Silas put up with her, benefited from her, and knew that she was a good person. The two cousins got along well.

  Forna was a pretty child too. But she wasn’t as pretty as Peyten had been beautiful.

  Peyten had been waiting for Silas when he arrived with his squad the following day. There was no sign of a baby anywhere in the cabin. Peyten had submissively let herself be taken captive, and she’d ridden on Tella’s horse with him for the trip back to the palace. She’d been pleasant, but stoic, not speaking much, not revealing much of herself to Tella, though he’d tried several times to open conversations.

  She’d cried when they’d come into view of the palace, but stifled her tears quickly.

  Tella had been shocked the following day when he’d been seated with the prince in a luxurious set of seats in a stadium the following day, and he watched in horror as the crowd in the stadium watched her beheading. There’d been a cheer from the bloodthirsty crowd, and the prince had thanked Tella profusely for returning his wayward concubine.

  Tella had numbly accepted the leather sack of heavy coins as payment. He’d left the stadium box without comment, and left the palace, and left the city immediately. He hadn’t waited for the prince’s arranged carriage. He’d rented a horse and fled. He booked his own passage across the ocean and fled. He’d walked directly from the port city of Shouldteen to the village, and turned the payment over to the village fathers. He’d been chastised for using funds from the bag to pay for his journey, when the prince was contractually obligated to pay for passage, but Tella didn’t care.

  And he’d never taken another contract in Rolemica again.

  Chapter 2

  Silas was sprinting through the forest, on one of the well-known paths beneath the trees, doing his best to find a way to set a false trail that would help him to win the game. It was most fun to be the quarry, to be the chosen member of the gang of children who had a turn to try to thwart all the others, and avoid capture.

  Silas had something in mind, something he had discovered just recently. There was a place among the stones of Mount Ellevin above the village that was promising. He thought he could go there, plant a false trail, take an unknown route, and evade his trackers. But he had to hurry to carry everything out before the others came looking for him.

  He stopped and deliberately broke a twig on a small tree on the side of the road. It would look like he had turned off the road there, but for his friends in the village, it would be too obvious, a clear false flag that was meant to misdirect the pursuit. But he wanted the others to find it and interpret it as a sign of sloppiness on his part, so that they would be overconfident when they followed his real false lead later.

  The boy ran on, his long thin legs eating up yardage through the shadows of the trees, until he did abruptly swerve off the trail with real intent, and start climbing up the side of the mountain. He entered a gully and left a clear footprint in the soft mud, then continued climbing, until he found a crevasse in the stony wall of the gully. He scrambled up the crevasse, and came out on a flat shelf of granite.

  The shelf offered a trail to his right, and he ran along it, until it opened on another shelf that had no other obvious exit. It was where he intended to unleash his plan. He scrambled down over the edge of the wide shelf, dropping down out of sight onto a narrow ledge beneath it. He scuffed the wisps of vegetation growing there, to show evidence that he had climbed down that way, then he tortured his fingers as he clung to thin cracks in the stone and climbed back up to the top of the shelf once again.

  When he regained the shelf surface he stood breathing heavily and flexing his fingers. He hadn’t considered that his fingers would be tired and cramped from the climb upward. He needed them to be fresh and strong for his next step. Ten feet out beyond the edge of the stone shelf hung a wild grape vine, a venerable, well-established growth that appeared thick and strong, and hung sixty feet long from a branch high overhead as it descended to the slopes of the mountainside down below. Silas planned to jump from the shelf to the vine.

  But he needed to have confidence that his fingers could grip the vine tightly. Otherwise, he had a long and unpleasant fall ahead of him. He continued to flex his fingers, trying to will them to strengthen, until he heard a shout of discovery, a sign that the pack of pursuers was afield and approaching. His fingers felt better, but not full strength. He had to decide, would they be strong enough?

  There was no other way off the shelf. He couldn’t really climb down from the ledge where he had planted the false trail, and there was no climbing upward on the sheer face of mountain stone that backstopped the shelf. He either had to grab the vine, or go back the way he had come, right into the arms of his pursuit.

  That thought was unacceptable. He wasn’t going to let himself be captured that easily. Silas’s legs tensed, then releas
ed, and he sprinted across the ledge, his fingers wide open. He prayed that all would go as planned. Please Kai, goddess of the air, let me fly to the vine, he silently thought to himself.

  His feet hit the edge of the stone ledge, and he pushed upward and outward. Time slowed down. The vine approached, and his arms were out in front of him. His hands reached forward. Gravity began to overcome his jump, and he began to curve downward, while still approaching the vine.

  His hands reached the vine and he desperately closed his fingers around the fibrous brown cable. It was strong and hard and rough, his fingers slid as they closed, giving him splinters and burns on the palms of his hands, but still he clenched the vine. His momentum jolted the stationary vine, and suddenly, instead of dropping or flying, he was swinging, as the vine accepted his impetus and swung away from the ledge.

  And still his hands clung to the vine. He had achieved success.

  The vine swung as he had expected it to, and he saw a large tree branch directly in front of him. That was good. That was according to plan. He flung a foot forward and it hooked upon the branch, anchoring him awkwardly as he stretched between the branch and the vine, his body providing the connecting tissue that held the two together.

  After a moment of deep breathing and closed eyes, Silas released one hand from the vine, and grabbed the tree limb, then flung his other foot over it, and secured himself to it. He pulled the vine over with the hand that continued to hold it, and he looped the vine upon the stub of a broken limb so that it would not swing back to its original position near the ledge. If his chasers did not notice the vine, they’d never unearth his intended escape route.

  Silas pulled himself up onto the branch, stood up, and walked out away from the trunk, holding onto other random limbs as he walked. He had studied the upper stages of the trees, and he thought he saw a path among their interwoven branches that would lead him to freedom. He jumped from the branches of one tree to another as if he were imitating a squirrel, then fluidly moved forward to that tree’s trunk, thereby putting several more strides of distance between himself and the mountainside shelf.

  There was a sound below and Silas froze. When he looked down, he saw his friends starting to scramble up the gully he had used. They were working fast, faster than he had expected.

  Silas circled around the tree trunk and dropped down to a lower limb, then followed it to where he could transfer to the branch of another tree, and transitioned again. He dropped down lower still and proceeded.

  Then he grew careless as he hurried, and he missed a step. Silas felt his foot find no support where he had expected it to rest, and his body began to tilt to the left and plunge downward. A fortuitous branch gave him a last second handle that accepted his death grip, and he saved himself from the fall, though his heart rate soared nonetheless. Chastened, he continued his route and soon dropped down to the ground level.

  After that, he was able to spring along the trail and return back home to the village. He raced to the post where the village bell hung, and he clanged it three times to signal his success, while he grinned to himself with delight.

  He took a drink of water from the barrel of water in the center of the village, one of the four barrels available for any member of the village to dip a drink from. The barrels came from the four primary springs that supplied water to the village, water that tasted and smelled and looked differently, depending on which spring was the source. Silas had never been out of the village to know what water was like anywhere else, but he and his friends commonly heard that other villages had water that had none of the flavor and none of the virtues that the mountain springs provided.

  Forna came bursting into the village square, out of breath, followed by Tagg.

  “See, I told you he’d be here!” the girl shouted back over her shoulder.

  “Alright, how did you do it?” she asked as she reached the barrels of water. She looked at Silas earnestly, while she took down one of the wooden dippers and dropped its cupped end into the water of a random barrel.

  “I’ll just keep that secret for now,” he told her with a laugh.

  She punched his shoulder, as Tagg took a turn dipping for water, and the others in the group began to filter in.

  “Alright, you keep your secret this time, but next time, we’ll catch you,” Forna warned. “It doesn’t matter if you have to go all the way to Shouldteen in the east or Ivaric in the west, we’ll track you down.”

  Tella sat on the porch of his home and listened to the banter among the children, pleased that Silas had done so well. Forna’s mention of the two nations that bordered the mountains around Brigamme reminded him that he’d soon be due to take a contract and leave the village. He hadn’t asked to look at the open Contracts recently, so he wasn’t sure where he would go, but he felt ready to start another new chase again. He’d make sure that he stayed on the small continent of Ellan Sheeant, with its six nations and wide wilderness; he wouldn’t go back over to Rolemica again.

  If he could be particularly choosy, he wouldn’t even go to Ivaric again. Recent years had not been kind to the residents of that dictatorial nation, as the new heir to the rulership had imposed more rigid rules and more cruel punishments. The other nations were pleasant to visit, though he had never been called to Faralag. No tracker had been called to the chaotic nation in the south in living memory.

  The village elders knew that Faraleg labored under a weak monarchy that had only sporadic interaction with the rest of the continent, but there seemed to be no anomalies or disasters brewing in the land – they just didn’t bother to spend their funds on hiring Brigamme trackers to capture their criminals. The people of the other nations though – Ivaric and Shouldteen, Avaleen, ruled by its council of nobles, Barnesnob, a land controlled by a “republic” of traders and merchants, along with the island nation of Amenozume, which peculiarly clung to a matriarchy – all used the village’s outstanding talents regularly.

  The thoughts about his next work assignment in the future were best left for the future, he told himself. For now, he could simply sit and enjoy the sounds of children playing innocently.

  Chapter 3

  Four Years Later

  Silas was tracking a runaway slave with an intentness that was admirable to the ordinary observer. He advanced along an empty, isolated trail with methodical precision, looking for clues, and finding them consistently. He was likely to find his quarry in a timely fashion by continuing his progress.

  But he wasn’t impressing the trio of judges that followed behind him, critiquing his work quietly.

  “He doesn’t have the Direction,” one of the judges, Phen, an elder of the Brigamme village council, spoke without prejudice to the other two.

  “No, he doesn’t. He’s superlative at the skills, but he doesn’t have the ability,” the woman on Phen’s left agreed.

  “At his age, with his development already, I just don’t believe it’s going to happen,” the third member of the tracking team said. He spoke with an element of sadness. Everyone in the village knew everyone else. All three of the judges knew Silas, just as they knew his parents, Tella and Rheme. It was a good family that no one wanted to have to fracture by stating the obvious.

  “Could we create a new class of tracker?” the woman whispered the question as the judges continued to follow Silas along the test route. A member of the village had laid down the simulated trail of a hypothetical runaway slave, and Silas was being judged on his ability to follow the trail.

  “How so?” Phen asked skeptically.

  “Well, you know, we could offer a tracker at a lower cost, one that wouldn’t come with the Contract guarantee,” the woman offered her suggestion. “There are always some clients who think first about the cost,” her voice trailed off as Phen looked at her doubtfully.

  “No, I know,” she conceded. “I just wanted to try to think differently, to see if there’s some way to avoid saying the worst case here.”

  “Silas?” Phen called loudly.
The boy ahead of the judges raised his head and turned to look at the trailing posse.

  “Silas, come here,” Phen directed.

  “I’m right on the trail,” Silas mildly offered, before he began to trot back to his observers.

  He was nervous.

  Silas knew he didn’t have the mystical ability that his friends were all exhibiting. In recent months he had seen several of them move out of the playing phase, and into the official village training phase, designated by the village council as trainees who were allowed to followed veteran trackers out on assignments. Tagg and Forna and others his age were gone already, while he continued to practice and wait with children who were three or four years younger than he was. And he knew, deep in his heart he knew, that the ability was not going to arise within him.

  Silas felt numbness beginning to envelope him as he anticipated the conversation he was about to hear. His father would be heartbroken. Silas rubbed his eyes as he felt moisture start to well; he was going to cry for his father as much as for himself, except that he would not allow himself to cry, he told himself.

  “His throat apple has grown, he’s got body hair and one day soon he may have to shave. His voice squeaks when it doesn’t grunt,” the judge on the right whispered to Phen. “He’s far into the age he should have changed.”

  “I know,” Phen affirmed with a mournful moan.

  Silas reached the three observers. He stopped and looked at their three faces, noting their eyes, their mouths, the wrinkles in their foreheads. They had nothing happy to say. The light breeze in the surrounding trees seemed to increase, making the leaves and limbs overhead rustle in unhappiness.

  “Silas, did you feel the presence of the runaway slave you were chasing?” Phen asked.

  It was a direct question. Up until that point, no one had brought the question out into the light of day. All parties had tried to find ways to avoid making Silas express what everyone knew.