Chapter 49- Leaving for Gomorrah(2)

Chapter 49: 49- Leaving for Gomorrah(2)

The wind coming off the western flats was carrying fine white salt-dust that stung Sol’s exposed cheeks and hissed lightly against his warm skin.

Half a mile from the concrete ramps of the interchange, Sol stopped pulling the sled.

His blindfolded head tilted slightly to the left, toward the southern highway ramp that merged with their road from the direction of the sunken quarries.

Clang... ... clang... ... clang.

The sound was faint, carried on the salt-wind between gusts, not the sharp ring of steel on steel, but the dull, rhythmic tolling of a heavy bronze bell swinging from a beam.

And underneath the bell, thirty voices were singing.

It wasn’t a marching song.

It was a slow, dragging dirge sung in three-part harmony, sounding eerily clean and practiced against the howl of the barren wastes.

"Off the road," Valera hissed immediately, grabbing the back of the sled and helping Sol haul it down the steep gravel embankment into the shadow of a collapsed concrete support pier beneath the lowest ramp.

They wedged the sled behind a pile of fallen rebar and crouched behind a four-foot block of frosted concrete.

Sol pressed his right hand lightly against Valera’s shoulder so she knew he had eyes on the road above, and focused his Peak-Stage thermal vision straight up through the gaps in the broken highway bridge.

Coming up the southern merge-ramp into the center of the overpass was a procession of thirty-two people.

Even through thermal sight, Sol could tell right away they weren’t traders from Gomorrah or soldiers from Hearth City.

In the middle of the group rolled a wide, flat-bed wagon with iron wheels.

There were no horses or lizard-beasts hitched to the front.

Instead, sixteen men and women were harnessed to heavy leather straps, pulling the wagon up the icy hill with their own backs.

Sol looked down at their feet and frowned behind his blindfold.

Every single one of the sixteen pullers was completely barefoot in the sub-zero salt-snow.

In his vision, their feet and ankles were dead, pitch-black blocks of severe frostbite, the flesh split open and scraping raw against the frozen concrete with every step yet their heart rates were slow, steady, and almost euphoric.

And inside their chests, their Level 1 cores (mostly Low- and Medium-Stage) weren’t neat spheres, they were sprawling, tumor-like growths of bright purple lunar taint that had spread into their shoulders and jaws, warping their skeletons so some of them walked with hunched, crooked spines or elongated arms.

"Look at the wagon bed," Valera whispered beside Sol’s ear, peeking through a narrow gap in the rebar with one eye.

The flat bed of the wagon wasn’t carrying food, furs, or iron.

Bolted across the entire ten-by-six-foot platform was a single, unbroken slab of polished silver mirror, angled slightly upward toward the pale, unblinking Silver Eye hanging in the gray sky above the overpass.

Grooves were carved into the metal frame around the mirror, leading down to four silver buckets hanging from the rear axle.

Walking behind the mirror-wagon were four men in long, sleeveless white robes that left their arms bare to the freezing wind.

Their forearms were covered in geometric scars where small chips of raw, unrefined lunar crystal had been shoved directly under their skin and left to heal into the meat. Three of them were Level 1 High-Stages.

The fourth man, walking at the head of the wagon with a long, curved silver skinning-knife hanging from a cord around his neck and a heavy bronze bell mounted on a staff in his hand burned in Sol’s vision with the dense, jagged purple star of a Level 1 Peak-Stage cultivator.

As the procession reached the flat center of the highway interchange directly above Sol and Valera’s hiding spot, one of the barefoot pullers on the left trace suddenly stumbled.

A loud, wet crack echoed across the overpass as the man’s frost-bitten left ankle snapped cleanly in half under his weight.

He went down hard on his knees on the frozen asphalt, coughing up a mouthful of bright purple, mist-choked blood as the rampant mutation in his lungs finally ruptured.

The singing stopped all at once.

Down behind the concrete pier, Sol tensed, expecting the robed priests to either bandage the man or leave him in the ditch like a Overseer would.

Instead, the Peak-Stage priest at the front of the wagon, the Confessor stopped ringing his bell and turned around.

"Brother Thomas," the Confessor said. His voice wasn’t angry or cold.

It sounded warm, gentle, and deeply moved, like a father watching his son graduate from the Academy.

"Your cup is full."

On the asphalt, the man with the broken ankle looked up at the priest, purple blood pouring down his chin.

He wasn’t crying in pain. In Sol’s thermal sight, the dying man’s heart was fluttering with sudden, frantic joy.

"Father," the crippled puller wept, holding up his trembling, frost-blackened hands toward the pale sky.

"I heard Her whisper when the bone broke. My flesh is too small for Her grace, Father. It hurts to stay down here in the dirt."

"Of course it hurts, little lamb," the Confessor murmured, walking back to the fallen man and unbuckling the leather harness from his bruised shoulders with gentle, practiced hands.

"Meat is a prison. Warm blood is a heavy chain that drags us down into the mud away from the Mother’s eye. Look at your brothers and sisters, how jealous they are that you were chosen to rise before we even reached the salt-mines."

Around the traces, the other fifteen barefoot pullers dropped to their knees on the ice, clasping their mutated, misshapen hands together and staring at the crippled man with wide, hungry, envious eyes.

"Help our brother onto the glass," the Confessor said softly.

Two of the High-Stage robed acolytes stepped forward, lifted the crippled man carefully by his armpits, and laid him flat on his back in the center of the giant silver mirror on the wagon bed.

The crippled man didn’t fight them. He didn’t even twitch when his bare back hit the freezing silver glass.

He tilted his chin back as far as it would go, exposing the pale, pulsing skin of his throat directly to the gray sky, and started singing the dirge again by himself in a wet, bubbling tenor.

Down under the bridge, Valera’s hand slowly closed over her own mouth behind her mask.

She had seen men executed in Hearth City, and she had seen beasts tear twenty-year-olds apart in the Meat Pen, but she had never seen a man smile while stretching his own neck out for a butcher’s knife.