Blood & Tears

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

A ROUGH MAN’S voice woke Isandor from his sleep. It was a shout, garbled words that his brain couldn’t process in its sleepy state, somewhere close outside the tent. He looked around, to find that he wasn’t, in fact, in the tent, but he’d been sleeping on the passenger bench of the truck. Well, that explained why he felt hot and stuffy.

It was still dark outside, and the orange glow of firelight flickered through the cabin, lighting the seat backs and the wheel and dashboard.

He now remembered Milleus suggesting that two of them sleep in the truck, for safety, while the third person guarded the goats against refugees desperate for milk or, heaven forbid, meat.

He sat up, feeling sweaty and shivery. The seat had been none too comfortable, its leather sweaty. His neck was sore, his back was sore and he had lost feeling in his left hand.

Jevaithi sat in the front passenger seat, her cloak drawn around her. By the way she held her head up, she was awake.

Outside the front window dark shadows moved in groups, all going down the hill. The firelight was not from the campfire—which had gone out—but from people carrying burning torches. There was purpose and aggression in the way they moved.

He saw a memory of a mob of young men, most older than himself, running through a snowy street. Setting fire to limpets. Shouts, and fights. The night sky lit up. That had been the night that the Outer City burned, the night they had fled.

“What’s going on?” he asked. His voice was croaky. By the skylights, his neck really hurt.

Jevaithi’s face looked pale in the flickering firelight. “I don’t know. A lot of people are going down there. None of them coming back.”

“Where is Milleus?” Isandor had seen him earlier that night, when he’d come to relieve Isandor from his guard duty in protecting the goats. Isandor had been stiff and cold, sitting on the trailer’s railing, with the goats asleep behind him, all piled half on top of each other, because there wasn’t enough room in the trailer for all of them to lie down. Isandor had sat there, with the metal railing biting in his backside, clutching the gun, jumping at every sound. And Milleus had come out of the truck for a change of guard.

“I haven’t seen him. He should be outside,” Jevaithi said, just as Isandor had reached that same conclusion.

Isandor pressed his nose against the glass. There were so many people going down that road. Their shouts sounded muffled through the glass, and he couldn’t make out the words, but the voices were rough with anger. He thought of all the young men he’d seen yesterday, standing around bored and angry, attracted to wherever there was an argument. The goats were bleating and jumping around, and their movement rocked the truck. Surely Milleus was out there somewhere.

“I’ll go and have a look,” he said.

“No.” Her eyes were wide, with little bright spots where the torchlight reflected in them. “Don’t go outside.”

“How else can I find out what’s going on?”

“Please. I’m scared. This is just like the night . . .” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. He knew. The night he’d rescued her from the Knights, and they had escaped the blue giant of a servitor. The night that the Outer City erupted in fights.

“If there is trouble, I need to help Milleus.”

Jevaithi’s eyes met his. She didn’t argue with that. “Please, be careful. If something happened to you . . .”

“You’ll be fine.” She’d be completely lost without either of them. “Just stay here, all right? Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t let anyone into the truck.”

She nodded, her eyes wide. “What if those hunters come back?”

“Lock the door after I’ve gone. You’ll be fine.” He repeated it to convince himself. By the skylights, he really didn’t like the look of what was happening outside.

He rummaged around in the back of the truck and found a length of wood that Milleus sometimes used as a walking stick. “Here.”

She took it from him. The determined expression on her face made him cringe. She would be nothing against trained Knights even if she had a gun. They had only one gun, and Milleus had it, or so he hoped.

He retrieved his cloak, dragged it over his shoulders and opened the door. A gust of smoke-scented wind blew grit and ash into his face. People were talking in nearby tents. Agitated voices. Somewhere in the darkness, someone started a truck engine with a hiss. He looked past the side of the truck.

“Milleus?”

No reply.

He let himself onto the ground, shut the door and walked past the truck. The goats stirred.

“Milleus?”

Milleus wasn’t sitting on the trailer bar, where he had been when Isandor went to sleep. The truck’s tool box stood on the ground, open, but the truck’s panels were all closed, and there was no sign of Milleus fiddling with the engine. The canopy had been pulled over the trailer as if they were on the road. Two goats stuck their hairy noses out between the bars of the railing, one of them curling its tongue to get hold of a piece of rope.

“Milleus!” Isandor’s heart thudded. Jevaithi’s heart, in his chest. Through it, she would feel everything.

“I’m here!” came a voice from behind him. Isandor whirled. A group of people stood between tents. The light was too feeble to distinguish faces, but the thought he could pick out Milleus’ old vest.

Isandor made his way between packs and vehicles, dogs and guy ropes. It wasn’t easy with his wooden leg. He almost tripped over a pack and had to steady himself against a tent pole, and a man inside shouted at him. Dogs started barking.

Milleus stood in a group with three men and a woman. The woman was saying, “. . . and I heard from my brother that the Mekta Road is very busy but still moving, but he’s not been able to get a word from Tiverius.”

One of the men said, “The lines are down.”

The other said, “All this newfangled telegraph technology. Pigeons would have gotten through ten times.”

And the woman, “You did well to get through at all.”

They stopped talking when Isandor joined the group. The woman raised an eyebrow at him. She was a middle-aged woman with the soft, pale-skinned features of an administrator. “This is the young man you were talking about, Milleus?”

“Yes,” Milleus said.

She eyed him up and down, but said nothing. Isandor thought her face was disapproving.

“What’s going on?” Isandor asked.

“He speaks Chevakian well,” the woman said, looking at Milleus as if Isandor wasn’t there.

“He’s a fast learner.”

“You did well, teaching him. Theirs is such a strange language.”

“Excuse me, what’s going on?” Isandor asked again. Why did these people think that because he was young and not Chevakian, they could talk over his head?

“We’ll be moving soon,” Milleus said.

“But it’s still dark.” And where were they moving to, anyway?

“Some young fellows have cut a hole in the fence and we’re moving through. They say that a lot of the tents in the camps are empty, and wondering what the hold-up is. We’ll be travelling through the camp now, before someone can come and stop us. We’ll be at my brother’s house in the morning.”

Isandor looked from the truck—and the open tool box—to Milleus. “You gave them the wire-cutters, didn’t you?”

“It was a ridiculous place to put a fence. Come on, let’s go.”

Isandor guessed that meant yes. Strange. Milleus had struck him as being someone who liked rules.

The woman and two men left and Milleus and Isandor went back to the truck, where Jevaithi was watching, a pale face behind the window. All around, people were busy dousing fires and packing up tents. Isandor grabbed the hay people had brought yesterday and stuffed it into bags Milleus had for that purpose. The goats could smell it and thought they were getting fed. They jostled each other to be in the position closest to Isandor. He scratched the animals behind the ears.

At the bend down the hill, the first trucks already started moving.

Isandor helped Milleus fire the furnace. All around, people were talking in eager voices. Hurry up, let’s get going. After days of being stuck here, they were moving again; they were doing something. Just like in the Outer City and in the Knights’ Eyrie, people got up to all sorts of trouble when they were bored or frustrated.

Soon, the convoy was rolling again, very slowly at first, and there was a long wait before the way ahead was clear enough for the truck to join the downhill convoy. While they waited, Milleus leaned his elbows on the truck’s wheel, and talked about his brother, who worked gathering information about the weather. Isandor hadn’t known that Chevakians made such detailed observations of weather patterns. He didn’t know that icefire rose and waned in cycles. He had known that Chevakians could measure it, but didn’t know that it determined so much of their weather.

Whichever way Isandor looked at it, there could be no peace between the two countries unless icefire was controlled. If the Knights, as he had seen, were experimenting with it, that could upset the entire climate in Chevakia and it would become as cold as the City of Glass. That would be a disaster.

In the City of Glass, people could hunt and eat meat—this habit of eating bread was very strange to him anyway—but Chevakia had no ocean where Legless Lions could live, and without their meat, the people would starve. They had camels and goats, but they ate grass and there would be none of that, either.

Their houses were also too flimsy for the cold. If the climate changed, many people would freeze before new houses could be built. And that was even without any of the deadly effects icefire itself had on Chevakians.

The truck before them jolted into action, and Milleus followed, still at walking pace, but soon going faster.

At rounding the bend, an amazing scene unrolled before them. The column of trucks moved through a large opening cut in the fence, with the wire mesh rolled away in both directions. The camp down the hill was dark, with just a few lamps burning between the tents. Further down the slope, the camp merged into the streets of Tiverius: lights in neat rows and the dark outlines of square buildings.

Tiverius, the legendary Chevakian capital. Isandor had often wished, but never truly believed that he’d ever come here. As butcher’s assistant in the Outer City, he’d been too poor. As Apprentice Knight, he would have been unwelcome.

Milleus steered the truck through the fence, held open by a couple of youths waving to the passing trucks.

Onto the grassy plain of the camp. The convoy chugged towards the tents.

Jevaithi leaned on his backrest; Isandor could feel her breath in his hair. She’d been quiet. For her, Tiverius would mean getting back to her old life. She could run from her heritage, but she would never be free from it.

The truck in front slowed down and then stopped.

“What now?” Milleus muttered.

Someone ran past the truck from the direction of the camp, shouting something Isandor didn’t catch. The first person was followed by two more people.

Someone else came running after them. “Stop, stop! Go back or I’ll fire!”

That man was joined by a second person, carrying a torch. Both wore uniforms Isandor had seen a few times on their drive from Milleus’ farm. Soldiers of the Chevakian army.

Milleus opened the door on his side and slid out of the truck. “Stay here.”

He walked past the front of the truck and said something to the soldiers.

“Get back into your vehicles, and turn around where you came from immediately,” the Chevakian soldier shouted back. “You are not allowed here.”

“We are refugees from Ensar and are on our way to Tiverius.” Milleus planted his hands at his sides, as he did when arguing. “We’ve been waiting on the other side of that fence for more than a day, and we’re fed up. We demand to use the road, which is a public road for all Chevakians. We will not go back there and wait. We can’t turn the convoy around. Too many vehicles are still coming from behind. Food is running out. Some people here have nowhere to stay in the city. They need to stay in the camp. They’re fed up with waiting.”