Chapter 54- Plans

Chapter 54: 54- Plans

"Look at the snow," Valera said quietly, looking around the base of the concrete pier where four black smudges of soot lay beside three frozen carcasses and four glowing shards- three High-Stages and Father Julian’s massive, jagged purple Peak-Stage crystal.

"If those twenty run all the way back to the Sanctuary and tell their High Confessors that there’s a man on the western road who burns souls before the Moon can eat them..."

"Then we better be inside the walls of Gomorrah before their priests walk back up this hill," Sol grunted, bending down to pick up Father Julian’s Peak shard and tossing it into their leather pouch alongside the three High-Stage stones.

He walked over to the snowbank, picked up the broken, six-pound carbon-steel head of his hatchet where it had snapped off the tang, and tossed the heavy chunk of old-world iron onto the pine sled next to the thirty Level 2 serpent scales.

"Why are you keeping the broken head?" Valera asked, helping him pull the sled up the rubble slope onto the main westbound deck of the highway overpass, stepping right past the abandoned, blood-stained silver mirror-wagon of the White Choir.

Sol looked down at the four-inch Level 2 serpent fang in his right hand, then back at the pile of slate-gray scales and broken tool steel on the sled.

"Because when we get to Gomorrah," Sol said, tying a fresh strip of linen over his glowing eyes and leaning his weight into the sled rope as they started down the western ramp toward the sprawling, smoke-choked horizon of the Salt Flats.

"I’m not buying another scrap axe off a table. I’m going to find a smith who can weld this iron head and these Level 2 fangs together into something that doesn’t break when a master looks at it."

The wind coming off the western flats didn’t carry snow. It carried dry, white salt that got inside Sol’s collar and stung the three open gashes across his forehead where Father Julian’s arm-crystals had raked him.

They didn’t stop until they were eight kilometers down the collapsed highway ramp, well clear of the overpass and the abandoned mirror-wagon.

Out here, the road flattened out completely, running straight onto the floor of a dead inland sea.

In Sol’s thermal vision, the Salt Flats looked like an endless, unbroken sheet of dull purple stone stretching out until it blurred into the cold fog of the horizon.

"There," Valera pointed with her chin toward a drift of gray salt-crust fifty meters off the north side of the asphalt.

Buried halfway into the drift was the rusted steel box of a pre-collapse cargo trailer, its wheels long since rotted away.

One of the rear doors had rusted off its hinges, leaving a dark, triangular gap just wide enough to squeeze their pine sled through.

Sol leaned into the hemp harness and dragged the ninety-kilogram sled off the road, the wooden runners scraping loudly over the hard salt pan before sliding into the dark belly of the trailer.

Inside, the air was still and smelled of old rust and dry dust.

Sol dropped the rope from his shoulder, pulled a heavy iron bar they had pried off the overpass railing across the broken door to block the wind, and sat down hard with his back against the corrugated steel wall.

He pulled his hand away from his forehead. The blood had mostly clotted in the cold air, mixed with a gritty paste of white salt.

"Don’t rub it with your gloves," Valera said, dropping her pack at the front of the trailer and kneeling beside him.

She pulled her Night-iron gauntlets off, tossed them onto the furs, and unscrewed the cap of their iron water canteen.

"The salt out here isn’t clean table salt. It’s full of alkali from the dead sea-bed. If you rub it into an open cut, it’ll leave a gray scar that never closes right."

"Add it to the collection," Sol grunted, wincing slightly as she poured a trickle of freezing water over a clean scrap of linen and wiped the cuts above his right eyebrow.

Without his blindfold, his eyes glowed a steady, muted orange in the dark metal box, illuminating the three dried claw-marks Sister Mara had left across Valera’s left cheek.

Sol reached up with his right hand and touched his thumb just below the bottom scratch on her cheekbone.

His skin was running hot after the fight, around forty degrees Celsius and the moment his warm thumb touched her freezing skin, the tight, bruised purple around the cuts began to soften.

"She got you through the mask," Sol said.

"Her nails were sharpened ," Valera said, leaning her cheek lightly into his palm for a second before going back to dabbing the salt out of his forehead.

"I broke her neck for it. We’re even."

She finished cleaning the blood out of his eyebrow, tossed the bloody rag into the corner, and sat back on her heels, looking down at the leather pouch tied to Sol’s belt.

Inside that pouch were Father Julian’s Peak-Stage crystal, the three High-Stage stones from the Choir acolytes, and the three Peak-Stage beast shards they had brought from the Sunken Flats.

Seven heavy cores in total.

Even through thick boar-leather, the conflicting lunar radiation was making the air in the trailer hum.

"What did he call you?" Valera asked quietly, pulling her wolf-fur coat tighter around her shoulders.

"Right after you burned that acolyte’s mist into soot. Before they lost their minds."

"The Old Thief," Sol said, reaching down to untie the pouch from his belt. "Said something about the First Book of the Eclipse."

Valera pulled her knees up against her chest, staring at the rusted ribs of the trailer wall.

"In Hearth City, the Inquisition burned all the religious texts from the first generation after Kan Hearth took over. They wanted people looking at the noble houses, not priests. Wait, my grandfather had a few pages from a Sanctuary catechism in his study."

Sol dumped the seven crystals out onto the cured elk-hide between their boots.

Father Julian’s crystal was ugly, the size of a hen’s egg, twisted like a gnarled root, and pulsing with a sickly, bruised violet light.