The Heretic-eARC Read online

  Most telling of all, Abel kept his tunic on even when days were as hot and humid as this one. His father viewed the Scouts as an indulgence and expected Abel to go into black when the time came for a real commission. But Abel knew what he wanted, and it was the Scout service. His tunic was russet, a color that matched the iron-tinted rock of the Redlands perfectly, and he wore it proudly.

  Abel ducked around the cadets’ melee and made his way across the hard-packed exercise yard. On his left were the dont corrals where the cavalry, Scouts, and signal corps mounts were pooled when not in use. The larger of the donts had quickly established dominance and took up half the space, while the rest of the herd had carefully packed themselves against one railing, leaving plenty of space for the stags to saunter about at their ease. The stags held the entire line of their spinal plumage erect at all times, which Abel thought had to get tiring after a while. The beta donts only bothered flicking up their large neck feathers from time to time when they became agitated or aroused, and the few does were studiously ignored the males. Rutting season was many months away.

  Abel liked donts and, like most military brats, had been around them all his life and figured he understood their ways far better than any civilian. Herd and territory were everything to a dont. When you could see the world in those terms, you could almost always get why donts did whatever they did. Mostly though, Abel knew that a Scout’s life depended on picking out good dont-flesh from bad, and he aimed to become an expert, because he aimed to become a Scout.

  Abel passed the corral and arrived at the large building of black River brick that served as District Command Headquarters. The entranceway was strung with a beadwork screen of Delta shells to keep out the flies, and it rattled as Abel passed through into the cool interior. An outer room held his father’s staff and his adjutant, Lieutenant Terian Courtemanche. Courtemanche was everything the puffy-featured Milovich was not—hardfaced, impatient with nonsense, and muscled like a fighter. Abel admired him, but was also a little afraid of him.

  “Cadet Dashian reporting,” Abel said, pulling himself to attention.

  Courtemanche looked up from a scroll he was proofreading for errors. He motioned Abel past him. “Go on in,” he said. “I think the old man has a bin of filing for you to tackle.” Abel groaned, which caused Courtemanche to indulge in the slightest smile. Then he returned to checking the scroll—and ignoring the presence of a lowly cadet.

  Abel passed through another bead curtain and entered the office of District Commander Joab Dashian, his father.

  Joab was not alone. There was a man in tan pants and belted overshirt. On a nearby table, a pith helmet rested, the mark of a civil engineer. Abel knew him slightly, but couldn’t remember his name.

  Sigismund Reidel.

  Okay. Thanks.

  Reidel and Abel’s father were examining a plan for what looked like, at a glance, an extension of the Hestinga irrigation system. Abel had seen (and filed) many such plans before. This one was drawn on a rolled-out scroll weighted down on either end by smooth River stones. Light from a skylight covered by a translucent section of herbidak hide poured down from directly above the deployed plan.

  “So the water ram would go here,” Joab said and pointed at a spot on the plan. “But that’s a bit far downstream. Will there be enough water remaining to raise it to the second plateau on the Escarpment?”

  “I’m fairly certain there will be,” Reidel answered, but from quavering tone of his voice, even Abel could tell he was very much not so sure.

  “Fairly?”

  “It seems the best place.”

  Joab sighed. “Politically, you mean.” He looked the engineer calmly in the eyes, then pointed to the plan. “This is Hornburg land, isn’t it?”

  “I believe so,” the engineer replied, “but there are no ownership boundaries on the plan, as you can see. It’s a district project, after all.”

  Joab shook his head. “Believe me, after five years serving here, the boundaries are etched in my mind. Move the ram upstream to the original location.”

  “But—”

  Joab held up a hand to cut Reidel off. “I understand. I will deal with the Hornburgs. This is no longer your problem.”

  After a moment of tension, the engineer nodded. He lifted the edge of his robe and used it to wipe a bit of sweat from his face. “We should double-check the flow, Commander.”

  Joab smiled, nodded toward the plan. “Let’s go over the figures again, Sigis,” he said. The two men began discussing ditch widths and flow rates, and Abel tuned them out. The pile of scrolls to be filed was on a broad table that his father used to spread out the really large maps, and Abel began to sort them by type. An upper border dipped in green pigment was command. Ochre was the color of logistics, and yellow represented communications with the local temple. Red was for messages sent and received by semaphore flag or courier. Secret documents were sealed with wax and scarab marking.

  Abel sorted the scrolls, about fifty in all, into their various baskets according to content. The baskets would be delivered and filed by date in the large company library adjacent to headquarters. Abel was occasionally assigned that job when a soldier who was literate could not be located. It happened more often than Abel would have liked. He hated filing.

  After more wrangling, the Reidel received his instructions and left the office. Joab rolled up the irrigation plan.

  “File that,” he said to Abel, “under trouble.”

  “Yes, sir. Ochre, sir?”

  His father nodded, and Abel began to carefully roll up the scroll.

  “So, how was class?” Joab settled into the chair behind his desk and poured himself a cup of wine from a clay pitcher.

  “Okay.”

  “Just okay?”

  “Calculating land areas.”

  “Useful.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Abel didn’t look over at his father. Was this the time to ask? Maybe. Maybe not. “Why did you have the water ram moved, Father?”

  “Oh, you were listening in, were you? Good.” His father took a sip of the wine. “The Hornburgs put pressure on the builders to move the ram downstream.”

  “Where there’s less water in the irrigation ditch,” replied Abel.

  “A ram needs lots of water moving fast to push a smaller amount of water uphill.”

  “I know that, Father.”

  Joab smiled. “Of course you do, Abel, but most don’t have the faintest idea how the things work. Matlan Hornburg, for instance. I’m sure he doesn’t know and doesn’t care.”

  “Then why did he want the ram on his family lands?”

  Joab looked at Abel, sighed, and took another, longer drink of wine. “Why? So the Hornburgs can control the water supply to the second Escarpment, that’s why. In a couple of years, that plateau is going to be filled with barley fields. Imagine if you have the power to cut off the water to all those fields from one point. Those farmers are going to do anything you ask.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like go through you as the middleman to broker grain supply to the temple and military. Act happy and keep their mouths shut when you claim two-thirds of their grain and pay them back one-third of the profits.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “It happens all the time, son,” Joab replied. “But not this time. Not in my district.” He drained his wine, set down the cup.

  “Whoever has the River has life.” It was a basic Thursday school lesson.

  “Exactly.”

  “What if Matlan Hornburg doesn’t like it, Father?” The Hornburgs were one of the big three families in the district. Everybody knew it.

  “I can guarantee you he won’t. He’ll be here within a week trying to browbeat me. I won’t budge, so he’ll take it up with Prelate Zilkovsky. Zilkovsky will sweet-talk him, but won’t give in, either, because he knows he can count on me. We have a pretty good working relationship, the prelate and I.”

  “Count on you to do what?”

 
; “Enforce the decision. Deal with the fallout,” Joab said. “Hornburg won’t let it stop there, you see. He’ll do something like cut off a grain delivery or two to the garrison, try to starve us into line. I’ll send a patrol to confiscate it from his warehouse. He’ll set his hired men to defend it. It’s going to be interesting.”

  “Or you could just give in, give him his ram, and avoid the hassle.”

  “That’s what he’s counting on. That’s what men like that always count on.”

  “What if the prelate gives in?”

  Joab glanced over at his son, chuckled. “Your mother used to ask me questions like that. She had a way of cutting to the heart of things, even when she knew the answer wouldn’t be pretty.” He looked back at his wine. “It’s simple, really. I’ll do what the chief priest orders.”

  “But Father, you just said—”

  “I’ve been in districts where the district military commander ran things. Gets ugly, corrupt, and violent. People need to trust in the civil authorities, or it’s every man for himself.” Joab smiled. “Anyway, Zilkovsky’s got a hide like a carnadon. He’s not about to let a Hornburg tell him how to rule Treville District.”

  “You could also have Hornburg killed now. Save the trouble.”

  “And become another Hornburg myself? I don’t think so, Abel.” Joab nodded toward the chair on the other side of his desk. “Sit down, son.” Abel sat down while Joab turned another cup over from the stack next to the pitcher and poured wine into both his own and the other. He pushed the cup toward Abel. “Drink. You look like you have something stuck in your throat. Something you want to tell me. Or ask me.”

  He knows, Abel thought. But how could he? It wasn’t as if his father was inside his thoughts in the same way as Raj and Center.

  Abel took a swallow from the glass, carefully set it down. “Father, I think I should be able to go out with the Scouts. Okay, maybe not into the deep Redlands,” he hastily added. “But at least on Rim patrols.”

  “And what makes you think they’d have you?”

  “Corporal Kruso said they could use an able body for water carrier.”

  “You’ve been talking to Kruso a lot?”

  “Mostly listening,” Abel said. “He likes to tell stories.”

  “And you believe his nonsense?”

  Abel frowned, looked down. I love to hear it. Because things happen in Kruso’s stories. Dangerous things, sometimes. But never boring. Never always the same. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Good, because it’s all true,” said Joab. “Kruso’s half Redlander and half lower Delta scum, but he’s one of best Scouts I’ve ever seen.” Joab considered his wine, still untouched. Abel knew the level would only slowly go down, Joab nursing his second cup throughout the afternoon with small sips. “I’ll tell you what. You keep good marks in school, and I’ll assign you Scout water duty starting next week.”

  Abel felt the weight, the need he’d felt for weeks, lighten. It was going to happen. He was going to get Scout duty! “Thank you, Father.”

  Joab held up a hand. “But only to the Upper Cliffs. No Rim patrol, not yet.”

  The weight returned. “But Father, I can—”

  “You can lose even that privilege if you aren’t careful.” Joab finally sipped his wine. “When you turn twelve, you can go out on the Rim. But only on routine patrols, and absolutely only with Captain Sharplett’s and the other Scouts’ permission.”

  Twelve. He would be twelve in…three months. He could make it. He could wait. And in the meantime, he would at least get to the Scout bases in the upper cliffs. You could see the Redlands from there.

  “And Abel, let me tell you something,” Joab continued. “Scouts are a hard breed. Have to be. They won’t care that you’re the son of the DMC. They have a tendency to let nature and events take care of the fuckups among themselves. And sometimes they’re willing to help nature along, if you understand what I mean.”

  “Would they take care of you, if you were a fuckup, Father?”

  Joab smiled a hard smile. “Well, I know what I would do if I were Scout and my commander was a fuckup,” he said. He glanced over at the rolled-up irrigation plan, sighed. “It’s my job to make sure it never comes to that.” He looked back to Abel. “You make that your job, too, Abel. Because you are my son, after all.”

  5

  “Blaskoye over thet hill fartleken,” said Kruso. “Peers out of Cascade comenz they.”

  The Blaskoye are coming over the hill. It looks like they’re coming from Cascade.

  Abel did not have to ask for a translation from Center. He’d grown up around Scouts and heard enough of the patois to understand it well, and to speak it so that he could make himself understood. It was far easier than Redlandish, which he was working on now. Most Scouts spoke at least some of that language, and he was learning what he could from them.

  Scoutish is a true patois of Landish and Redlandish, Center explained. But it is on its way to becoming a creole. Many similar patois have sprouted and died in the three thousand years since the Collapse. You must remember that Redlandish is far from a unified tongue, and that Landish itself did not start off as a single language, but as a mixture of tongues that were as different from one another as Spanish and French were from Catalan.

  What?

  I think he’s referring to old Earth, lad. That kind of speech was long gone when I was a boy.

  True to his word, Joab had permitted the twelve-year-old Abel to go on Rim patrol with the Scouts. It had been a year now that he’d been allowed to accompany them. Abel had spent every moment he could with them. Abel had been worried that the Scouts would hold his age and his relative lack of rank against him, but he’d quickly learned that the Scouts didn’t give a damn about any of that. If you could pull your load and make yourself useful in some way, you were in.

  He’d also found out more disquieting things. Things he didn’t know quite what to make of. Like the fact that most of the Scouts were very religious, but religious in a manner that Abel was fairly certain wouldn’t be approved of by any Thursday school teacher he’d ever had. They had a semi-secret cult that worshipped Zentrum’s mother, Irisobrian. She was a figure of veneration to many of the Scouts, and a Scoutish swearword to them all.

  According to the cult mystery story, Irisobrian had died in childbirth, but then, miraculously, had nursed the young Zentrum on her breast for fifty days and fifty nights while lying beside the River and herself decaying to bones.

  It was Irisobrian’s mystical breast milk that was said to have made Zentrum invisible, so there was a lot of oath making among the Scouts on the bones and mother’s milk of Irisobrian.

  Furthermore, there was an Irisobrian dispensation on several Scout items that would otherwise have been declared Stasis proscriptions or even nishterlaub. For instance, instead of employing flint and steel as directed by the Law, the Scouts sometimes needed to light a quick fire with the aid of a lucifer. These were made from powder taken from a broken percussion cap and mixed with glue from a desert cactus that grew near the Rim. The lucifers stank of sulfur, but were highly effective for getting fires going. Scouts often carried punk sticks on longer trips, but punk was notorious for burning down and leaving you with not a trace of fire to start with at the end of the day. At such times, the last thing you wanted to do was to spend a quarter-watch striking sparks and puffing into tinder to get fire going. And sometimes to do so was perilous.

  Kruso had given Abel his own box of matches for emergencies, and Abel carried it in the inside pocket of his tunic, as did most Scouts. Sometimes when he heard the lucifers rattle there, he felt a faint qualm at the almost-nishterlaub feel of possessing them. But mostly, he didn’t think much about carrying them one way or the other.

  “Well and secret guard tham. To the civvies showez them is a bad thing,” Kruso had intoned. “Comenz of it a quiver of troubles.”

  Kruso was wrinkled and weather-beaten. He was almost as short as Abel, and built like a gnome. He s
eemed old, but Center had told Abel that Kruso was only thirty-five.

  Every evening Kruso placed a wad of Delta tobacco into a clay pipe, pulled a smoking wand from the fire, and puffed away by the evening fire. He never used the pipe during the day, however.

  “Hide sign and go to the Lady tomorrow, leave sign and she’ll take you today,” Kruso had once pronounced with his usual dry chuckle.

  Abel figured Kruso had given him the matches not so much as an aid, but to draw Abel into the cult. Kruso was quite devout when it came to Irisobrianism. Abel had attended a couple of rites, but, on Center’s advice, had declined to become a full initiate.

  You would not like the communion meat they share, Center had said. It must be at least three days old to have achieved sacred status.

  After he was permitted to accompany the Scouts, Abel concentrated on finding ways to become useful. At first, this had taken the form of being a simple water carrier. Men who moved fast and light through the Redlands needed to drink a great deal more than Abel had ever imagined. Even though the Scouts were famous for being able to go a very long time without taking a drink, he’d found that this ability was not something they cultivated or celebrated among themselves. On the contrary, it was a constant Scout obsession to have plenty of water along—because one setback, one extension of a mission, would soon mean you didn’t have enough, and had no way of getting more. It was quite possible to die, and to die horribly, in the Redlands if you went too far out without the liquid to take you back.

  Over the months, he’d demonstrated his usefulness and abilities to the Scouts in other ways. He’d graduated from water boy to dont keeper, and finally worked himself up to what was, for all intents and purposes, a squad regular. He’d proved his worth several times in that regard. Abel knew himself to be generally dexterous and naturally stealthy, and it didn’t hurt to have Center, who could use his quantum-computing ability to predict what lay on the other side of a rock, hill, or clump of desert plants.