Iron Circle Page 4

  “Manuel?”

  The servant gave no sign of recognition. He stood before Thorin with shoulders slumped, his head hanging forward like the bulb of a wilting flower. “Yes, Jefe?”

  “Fetch Delgado and Evangelista, would you? Senor Ramirez wishes to plead his case before the trinity court.”

  “Yes, Jefe.”

  He pushed aside one of the drapes to reveal an oak cabinet standing on ornately carved legs—more pre-War scavenge—from which he drew two large jars. He carried them under his withered arms, hugging the smooth glass tight to his chest. Another servant, moving with well-rehearsed ease, set out a pedestal retrieved from behind another bit of drapery. Manuel placed the jars on the pedestal, positioning them at just the right angle to catch a sliver of sunlight and illuminate their contents.

  Each jar held a human head floating in some kind of preservative brine—though floating was inapt, as the heads barely fit their containers and had been wedged inside, their faces pressed against the glass. The tight confines gave them a smeared, grotesque look, cheeks collapsing into eye sockets and noses pressed into warty stumps. Selena couldn’t discern much of anything about the men from the remains, though Marcus seemed to recognize them without trouble. His complexion, already diminished by days without sunlight, took on the ghostly near-translucence of a cave fish.

  Thorin clearly relished this bit of theatre. He stood and took his place beside the pedestal, hands clasped behind his back. “The trinity court is in session, Senor Ramirez. Please state your case.”

  “But … you cannot …”

  “Times have changed. The triumvirate is no more. The Hombres and Dagas are all Hijos now. Most were happy to join and have assumed positions of honor. Those who did not, like Manuel here… well, they saw the light soon enough, eh?”

  He slapped Manuel on the back. The blow was jocular and glancing, but Manuel nearly buckled under its force.

  “Your claim is discarded, Marcus. The court is dead. Delgado is dead. Evangelista is dead. There is only me. And you are my dog. When I say bark, you bark. When I say bite, you bite. If you disobey … well, bad dogs must be put down, no? Though one must not blame the pup alone. The fault often lies with the bitch.”

  The last bit of flexion seemed to abandon Marcus’s joints. He stood as if bound at every inch to a thin steel column. Only his fingers moved, beset by a trembling Selena thought impossible of his steady hands.

  Thorin’s attention turned to Selena.

  “And what to do with this one?”

  His eyes crept up and down. Displeasure puckered his lips.

  “God’s bleeding asshole, woman. Where are your tits? And those shoulders. You’re built like a boy.”

  “Some men like that, Jefe,” said one of Thorin’s attendants, a round-faced man with a scraggle of beard dangling from his chin.

  Thorin spat. “Deviants. It’s a sad thing when men hold such unhappy appetites. Still, for every man, a taste. Take her.”

  A guard moved to grab Selena by the shoulder. She broke two of his fingers and flipped him over her back, hurling him into the second man as he charged. His forehead drove square into the second man’s gut and they went down in a groaning pile. The fight took her, keening her ears and hewing back the periphery of her vision until the whole room flooded in. At the far edge of her attention, she saw Marcus smile.

  It took six more men to subdue her. They pummeled her to submission, splitting the skin above one eye and igniting fresh flames of agony along the ravaged fringes of her wounded ear. A few giggled as they dragged her to Thorin, though they were the nervous giggles of men who skirted death by inches. On each side of her, a man held one of her arms in both of his own, while a third kinked his elbow around her neck. The others stood a few feet back, ready to rush in if necessary, though the fight had left Selena for now. She had a knack for choosing her moments, and this wasn’t one of them. She glared at Thorin. Inside her, an infant fear began to wail. She smothered it in its crib.

  This show of defiance seemed to amuse Thorin. He laughed and clapped his hands, his rings clacking together like silverware at the start of a rich and bloody feast. “This girl is more a man than you, Manuel! The first to stick her will come away with a stump. No, the Circle’s a better place for her. Bring her to Todd and see if he’s interested.”

  Thorin’s men came for her again. This time they were prepared. She felt something sharp slide into her arm just below her shoulder. Coldness spread through her body. The room grew dark, the floor slanted abruptly to the right, and a ragged black hole swallowed her up.

  9: Scavengers

  To think just a few days before, Simon had caught himself missing the cold.

  It was with him now, a handsy admirer running its fingers along every inch of exposed skin, panting gusts of rime-flecked wind into his ears, tugging on him with its relentless, smothering embrace. This was no frigid blast of New Canaan winter—the temperature hung well above freezing, while the sparse foliage of the roadside shrubs and the small birds flitting about their branches clung doggedly to autumn. A good jacket and woolen cap would have been plenty. But Simon had neither, only the chambray shirt and cotton pants he’d worn the day he fled The Mayor’s manor, plus a crude shawl they’d bartered for on the road. The outfit left him fighting a war of attrition with the weather, and the weather had him hopelessly outgunned. It picked off his body heat degree by exhausted degree, left his face chapped and peeling, filled his bones with ground ice.

  As his outside chilled, his insides burned. His empty belly sizzled like a kettle boiled dry, its brittle metal warping under hunger’s relentless heat. The canteen dangled from his belt loop, a useless appendage tapping out a ragged march beat on his thigh. He’d drunk its last dregs that morning; the food he’d finished two days before. The provisions he’d taken from the pueblo shop, so seemingly bounteous at the outset, had been laughably meager in practice. He’d never realized how much food a person ate in a day. It didn’t seem like much when parceled into meals and snacks, but it went fast.

  Never before had he felt such hunger, such thirst, such utter exhaustion. Even on his long trek through the Middle Wastes, when Fallowfield had risen from the desert of yellow locust and saved them, he’d never gone a day without at least some small bit of sustenance. Supplies had been meager, dwindling as they went into little more than a handful of mealy fruit or flavorless grain boiled into gruel—but there’d always been something. Selena’s rationing kept their rations in check, and her bartering ensured they left every outpost or passing merchant with something to show for the encounter. She’d kept them going for months as the road grew worse and the outposts sparser. And here was Simon, alone barely a week and already stumbling onto famine’s doorstep. Pathetic. His helplessness filled him with a corrosive blend of disgust and self-pity. Selena was better off without him.

  Overcome with exhaustion, Simon slumped against a knuckle of basalt rising from the hardpan. He glanced back the way he’d come and noticed with a pang of despair that he’d lost the road. Not that it was much of a road to begin with, just a few ruts scored into the dirt by passing wagons. At some point, he must have veered to one side or another and carried on unknowingly. God only knew how far he’d strayed.

  He cupped his face in his hands and sobbed.

  When his eyes ran dry, and his chest ceased its hitching, he hoisted himself upright and perched atop the basalt outcrop to survey his surroundings. He didn’t expect to see much. The wilds south of Fallowfield were as barren as the Middle Wastes, spared ransacking by the yellow locust only because there was nothing in the soil worth stealing. Hardpan spread out in every direction like a wrinkled bed sheet. Green-grey shrubs and anemic grasses clung tenuously to the soil, and curtains of emaciated dirt flapped up with every gust of wind. A clutch of old buildings jutted from the ground to the west, crumbling monoliths from the years before the Last War. Simon had ridden past a few of these on their journey south. Hopelessl
y poisoned places, all of them long since abandoned, their bones picked over by scavengers. Simon would almost certainly find nothing useful there, and could wind up befallen with bone sickness from the pre-War weapons leveled on insurgent towns. To venture all that way with diminished supplies was folly, an act of raw desperation.

  And you’re just desperate enough to try it, buddy. Sighing at this unfortunate truth, Simon stepped from the rock and began his long trek west.

  His departure from the path grew increasingly evident. The southern road on which he’d traveled traced the remnants of an ancient riverbed, the memory of its dried-up waters lingering in the gentle downward slope of the land over which it passed. To the west, the earth had undergone no such leveling, and the crags and chasms grew denser and deeper and higher. Simon found himself clambering over sharp rises or skidding down steep bluffs, his shoes dislodging chunks of old stone and setting off tiny rockslides that heralded his arrival. The ground slept uneasily, and Simon feared his footfalls might cause some cataclysmic awakening—a canyon yawping open beneath his feet, or an avalanche of coarse rock grinding him to a gooey paste in its passing.

  The gaps soon grew unbridgeable, the protrusions unclimbable, and Simon found himself taking long detours and struggling to reorient himself. Dust settled over every inch of him. An alkali stink filled his nostrils, which cracked and bled from the desiccating dust. He came upon footprints and followed them with a flicker of hope before realizing they were his own.

  Despondent, Simon sat on the ground and found he lacked the energy to stand back up. A profound lethargy seeped into his muscles, dense as molten lead. Hunger squeezed his stomach into a wad of wet, pulpy misery. He clutched his belly and lay in the dust, moaning softly.

  When the figure appeared, Simon assumed she was a hallucination. She was certainly strange enough: a girl his age or younger, black hair flowing to her waist in clumpy, matted ribbons. She wore a grey trench coat several sizes too big for her. Crude pockets motleyed its sides from lapel to waist, their bellies bulging with bits of scrap. A leather satchel dangled from one shoulder. Her eyes hid behind tinted goggles. She studied him with her head cocked to one side, her intentions as opaque as the lenses shrouding her eyes.

  “Hey, are you okay?” the apparition asked.

  Simon groaned. Talking seemed much too painful, and he felt no real need to engage a product of his misfiring psyche in conversation. The figure approached, the scuff of her soles against the dirt audible in the near-stillness. She squatted next to him, unscrewed the lid from a metal canteen, and offered him a sip. He puckered his lips on reflex, expecting the figure to fade away.

  Instead, the apparition pressed the canteen to his mouth—its rim warm and smooth and unquestionably tangible—and drizzled in a swallow of clean, fresh water. He nearly spat it onto the ground in shock. His lips sealed it in at the last second. He coughed into his arm. The girl slapped his back until the coughing subsided and held out the canteen again. Simon took it himself this time, sipping carefully.

  “It’s good,” he rasped, shocked by the gravelly honk that was his voice. Who knew vocal cords could go out of tune so quickly? He cleared his throat, and his next words sounded a little more normal. “Thanks a lot.”

  He took another swig, longer this time. As his thirst abated, fresh discomforts shouldered in to take its place. He clutched his stomach as a cramp warbled through him and shivered. The girl touched his forehead and chewed the side of her lip.

  “We’d better get you warmed up. Come on.”

  She bent forward and scooped him up in a single neat motion, interlocking her arm with his so they stood shoulder to shoulder. Simon stumbled along beside her, his feet tripping over every rock and crevice. The girl bore his weight easily. Simon marveled at her strength; in his diminished state, it seemed almost superhuman.

  They rounded a cap of wind-smoothed stone and came to a rift in the desert’s knobbly crust. No more than a fingers-width at its tapered end, it widened as it ran, spreading into a canyon thirty feet across. Simon peered over the edge. The crevice bottomed out after fifty or so feet into a bed of pebbly earth.

  “Goin’ gets a little tricky here,” the girl said. “But we’ll take it slow.”

  Chunks of ballast and granite formed a crude staircase into the rift. Simon would have found it perilous even in peak health, but the girl descended as if down a gentle slope, her stride almost casual. Simon matched her footing as best he could, leaning on her whenever his balance faltered. His stomach sloshed with every surmounted precipice, but they made it down without incident.

  Compared to the stone and hardpan that scabbed the higher terrain, the earth at the base of the canyon was rich and spongy. Though a far cry from garden soil, it lacked the desiccated snakeskin texture of the surrounding landscape. This ground had known water and remembered it in its pebbly deposits and soft undulations of clay.

  The girl led Simon around a few bulges of stone toward the corner where the two cliff faces intersected. Rocky overhangs blocked the sun and the lower walls tapered inward, leading to a cragged aperture. A gust of chilly air whistled through the gap. Simon eyed the cavern warily.

  “Come on,” the girl said and led him forward. Too tired to resist, Simon swallowed his unease and walked in step with her.

  The tunnel bent this way and that, tracing an ancient subterranean stream. Fractured columns of light lanced through cracks in the ceiling. A dusty, metallic smell filled the air, threaded with acrid whiffs of old smoke. The smoky undertones grew more prominent as Simon, and the girl rounded a final bend and entered a high-ceilinged chamber. A dwindling cookfire burned in a ring of stones, unfurling ribbons of white smoke toward the long, jagged crack snaking across the ceiling. They seemed by the looks of it to be in an extension of the canyon, a narrow appendix where the two cliff tops briefly parted before resuming their intimate tectonic embrace.

  An old man sat cross-legged before the fire, turning a spit over its smoldering coals. He turned his head to the girl, revealing a weathered face from which a long hook nose burst like an outcrop of stone. A swath of scar tissue mottled the right half of his face from cheek to chin.

  “A visitor,” the man said.

  “I found him passed out in the flats,” the girl explained. “He was heading for the city, near as I can tell.”

  His gaze floated toward Simon. “You ask him why?”

  “Didn’t seem right to question him. Best get him warmed up first. Here you go, pal.”

  She sat him before the fire opposite the old man, drew a sheet of dun cloth from a wicker basket, and draped it over Simon’s shoulders. The material was fibrous and itchy, but he cuddled into it regardless, savoring the warmth it lay over his bones. He wrapped it tighter around himself as the girl crossed the cavern to a steel hand pump thrusting up from the pebbly soil. She worked the handle up and down. The fulcrum creaked in its socket with every downswing. After a few pumps, the spout sneezed a jet of water into a tin bucket. She gave a few more measured strokes and water began to pour out more steadily. Simon watched the process closely, partially out of his innate interest in the workings of anything mechanical and partly to avoid making eye contact with the old man, who watched him intently.

  The girl returned with the bucket and set it near the cookfire. She dipped her canteen into the water and offered it around, first to Simon and then to the old man. Both drank: Simon eagerly, chugging nearly half the bottle; the old man gingerly, his face pinched and slightly pained. He wiped his mouth and handed the canteen back to the girl.

  “Introductions’d be good now, don’t you think?” he said. His eyebrows arched solemnly, though a small curl of his lips implied more teasing than admonition. The girl shrugged her bag from her shoulders and plopped on the ground next to him.

  “Right, sorry. I’m Emily. This here’s my dad, Otis.”

  The old man frowned. “You didn’t even introduce yourself?”

  “He was kee
led over! What’m I supposed to do, check his brands?”

  The old man scratched his scar. “I suppose…”

  This exchange slipped by Simon largely unnoticed. His attention fixed on the old man. That’s her dad? He looked old enough to be her grandfather. Fascination drew his eye, while his painter’s instinct found several subtle signs to bolster the claim. He wasn’t, on closer inspection, quite as old as he first appeared. His face, though lined with wrinkles, was firm, his skin unblemished with the discolorations of aging. He scratched his neck with his left hand, which lacked an index and middle finger above the first knuckle. The remaining fingers were thick and gnarled, prehensile tree roots.

  Emily and Otis stared at Simon expectantly. He felt a moment’s panic before realizing he still hadn’t told them his name. “I’m Simon. Thanks for your help. I don’t think I could’ve gone any farther on my own.”

  Otis warmed his hands—one crippled, one whole—over the coals. He wiggled his fingers and resumed turning the spit, tucking his mutilated left hand out of sight beneath the blanket. “If you don’t mind me asking, where exactly was it you were goin’?”

  Simon sucked his teeth. Life on the road had made him reluctant to hand over even the tiniest scrap of information about himself. But he needed all the help he could get, and while telling strangers where he’d come from could get him in trouble—recent history had taught him that particular lesson—he couldn’t see what harm could come from saying where he was going.

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said. “But my first guess is Juarez.”

  At this, father and daughter looked at one another. Information passed between them wordlessly, conveyed by the subtle semaphore of family. Otis cleared his throat.

  “Don’t mean no offense, but you ain’t equipped to make it twenty wheels with what you got on you. And Juarez is closer to two hundred.”