The Seekers: The Children of Darkness (Dystopian Sci-Fi - Book 1) Page 13

  A tremor rattled down Nathaniel’s spine. Have I emerged, or did the old prisoner choose me as an act of desperation?

  He put his concerns into words. “Why did it take so long? How do we know we’re the true seekers?”

  “Why so long? Because the Temple is skilled at extinguishing the fire in our hearts. That’s the very purpose of a teaching.”

  Thomas rose suddenly and drifted to the window.

  The vicar crumpled his brow and eyed him as he went.

  “He’s had a teaching,” Orah whispered.

  The vicar put a hand to his breast and drew in a quick breath. “Oh my, I’ve been insensitive again.”

  “It’s not your fault.” Nathaniel rose. “Come back, Thomas. We don’t have time for—”

  The vicar waved Nathaniel off and went to Thomas instead. The clergyman reached out, a father about to comfort his son, but his hand wavered in mid-air.

  He’s stuck, Nathaniel realized, torn between vicar and keeper. His temple caused the harm. Does he have the right to heal the pain?

  Finally, keeper vanquished vicar, and he touched Thomas’s arm. “Forgive me. I misspoke. A teaching can never snuff out your fire, but can only drive it deeper.”

  Thomas turned, his face a hopeful question. “Then can it burn again?”

  “That, Thomas, is up to you.”

  The vicar led him back to his chair and riveted Nathaniel with a gaze. “Are you the true seekers? We’ll only know after you find the keep and use its contents to change the world.”

  Nathaniel’s dreams, once airy like gossamer, now took substance, threatening to crash to the floor of their own weight. Why me?

  The vicar glanced out the window, noting the angle of the sun. “You should leave soon if you hope to travel today, but before you do, I have one last obligation.”

  He opened the cabinet on the wall, exposing the sun icon, and slid the shelf aside. From a hidden compartment beneath it he withdrew the now familiar scroll.

  Orah raised an eyebrow. “You hid the keepers scroll beneath the sun icon?”

  He gave a half smile. “My little joke.”

  Nathaniel rose to accept the scroll, but the vicar strode past him to Thomas.

  “Why give it to me?” Thomas said.

  “Because you are a seeker.”

  Thomas hesitated, and then accepted the scroll.

  The vicar beamed. “Next you go to Riverbend, a trip as far as all the distance you’ve traveled till now, but I can help you get there. Have you ever seen a map?”

  “Do you mean a treasure map,” Orah said, “like we made when we were little?”

  “Similar, but on a broader scale.”

  He fetched a paper from the cabinet and unfolded it on the table. “This map describes our whole world—another secret the Temple conceals.”

  Thomas pointed at a spot on the map. “That says Bradford. Is that where we are?”

  “Yes, Thomas, and at the far left is Little Pond.”

  Orah traced their journey from Little Pond to Adamsville and Bradford, and then released a sigh. “I wish we’d had this when we started.”

  “To find the next keeper, you must go....” The vicar slid his finger along the parchment, not stopping until the word Riverbend.

  Orah gestured at an unusually windy road. “What’s that?”

  “A river. From the breadth on the map, I’d say a wide one.”

  “And this?” She pointed farther north to scribbles along the edge.

  The vicar shrugged. “Maybe wilderness or the edge of the world.”

  Nathaniel’s shoulders slumped. So far to go, so much unknown. He squinted as an orange ray of light streamed through the window from the low afternoon sun.

  Time to leave, but one last question gnawed at him. “We’re grateful for your help, so it pains me to ask, but how do you resolve the lie between vicar and keeper?”

  No sooner had the words come out than he worried he’d offended his host.

  The vicar grimaced and blinked twice, but then the grimace turned into a smile. “My son, every age comes with its good and evil. The Temple brought much good, overcoming the chaos of the prior age, but over time it’s become corrupted itself. Someday a new order will replace it. That’s not my task. My role as keeper has been to watch and wait. In the meantime, I do what I can for my people, but make no mistake—when the world changes, I’ll support the new way. You three may be the impetus for that change.”

  The day had flown by. The light through the window diminished.

  Light diminished in Nathaniel as well. When his first test came, he’d fled to the mountains. When Samuel offered the scroll, he’d thought only of childish dreams. He’d let his impatience with Thomas get the better of him, where the vicar had treated his friend with kindness. This gentle man, who’d kept the secret all these years, still managed to minister selflessly to his people. Both he and the vicar were dreamers, but only one was worthy of the keep.

  He went to his pack and took out the first two scrolls, and as the others watched, presented them to the vicar of Bradford.

  The vicar looked bewildered at first, but then shook his head. “No, Nathaniel, you must bear this burden, not I. The people of Bradford need me.” He forced a warm smile. “And if a vicar tried to seek the keep, he wouldn’t get very far.”

  “You’re more deserving than I am.”

  “More deserving?” The vicar’s eyes flared. “That depends not on how hot your fire burns today, but how you stoke the flames when the time comes. Until then, no one knows who’s deserving.”

  Thomas went to Nathaniel and handed him the third scroll, and Orah pressed his fingers until they curled around the three. It was settled.

  “I’ll gather supplies if you like,” the vicar said, “but I hate to send you out so late. I’d be pleased to host you for the night so you can leave refreshed in the morning.”

  Orah glanced longingly at the roof overhead and began to answer, but Nathaniel cut her short.

  “Thank you, but you’ve shown us the magnitude of our task. More than our comfort’s at stake. We should start right away.”

  The vicar of Bradford, third keeper of a great secret, regarded the three of them with a wistful look in his eyes. “My heart wishes you’d stay, but my head tells me you’re wise to go. Those messages from the Temple carried the utmost urgency, and I fear for your safety. Wait here while I fetch you supplies.” Then he vanished down the spiral stairs.

  As the light faded from the rectory, Nathaniel dwelled in his thoughts. The journey had begun as a dream and continued as an adventure. In Adamsville he’d learned to appreciate the risks, but only here in Bradford did he finally understand the stakes.

  The seekers were the bridge to a new world.

  Chapter 19 – The End of the Chain

  That night, as soon as the campfire flickered into life, Orah pulled out the third scroll. Thanks to the vicar of Bradford, she already knew the city—Riverbend. The symbol depicted a shoe, suggesting a cobbler, but the pass phrase sounded more baffling than the others. The seekers were to say, “We have traveled far, but our journey has just begun. The true light drives us on.” And the next keeper would respond, “May you find the end you seek, and may the truth you discover hasten a new beginning.”

  The wording troubled Thomas. “A beginning? If Riverbend’s the beginning, my feet’ll fall off before we find the keep.”

  “Oh hush. It’s just an expression. Let’s move on to the rhyme before the words fade.”

  She prayed to glean more meaning from the latest verse, but the lines on the third scroll proved no clearer than the others.

  For a full eight days you shall race

  Two doors to the mouth of the snake

  Once great, it now stands alone

  Sixteen stars shall set the doors free

  She stared in silence as the letters dissolved into flecks of black and vanished into the white background of the scroll.

  Thomas intruded on
her thoughts. “What if the founders had gone mad?”

  “They were the most brilliant of a brilliant age,” she said. “The puzzle’s meant to be hard. The burden is on the seekers to solve the rhyme.”

  Thomas persisted in that annoying way he had of focusing on silly details. “Brilliant, sure, but they couldn’t have been happy. Their world was crumbling around them. I’d be angry, at least, if not mad.”

  She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No, Thomas, they were not mad.”

  “How else do you explain these verses?”

  She lost patience with his pestering and struck out with a scowl. “Maybe you’re not smart enough to understand the rhyme.”

  “And you are? Then tell me what it means?”

  Rather than continue the debate, she withdrew to the edge of the shadows and dropped cross-legged on the ground with her back to her friends. The heat of the fire failed to reach where she sat, so she clasped her arms around herself, rocked back and forth, and did her best to hide a shiver.

  After a time, she heard the others readying for bed. She strode to where the scroll still lay in its holder, and in a single motion grasped the wooden handles and swung the frame over the embers. The words reappeared, and her lips moved soundlessly as she committed them to memory.

  When she finished, she glanced up to find Nathaniel eyeing her.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, “I’ll add these words to our marching song, but tonight I’ll dream of them. The answer will come to me, Nathaniel of Little Pond. I swear it.”

  ***

  No dreams came to Orah that night, and she hardly slept. Instead, the rhyme rattled round in her half-awake brain but continued to make no sense. As the moon set and the breeze stilled in the trees, she wondered if their quest also made no sense—spinners and vicars preserving secrets across centuries, leading them on a race to a place that may not even exist. She wished she’d never left the comfort of Little Pond.

  Then she recalled Thomas’s blank stare, her father’s gaunt face, and the tears on her mother’s cheeks when she told how the teaching had killed him. She pictured the pompous panel of vicars, preaching their truth to her—a truth based on lies.

  With a sigh, she roused herself and tossed a few branches onto the dwindling fire. The flames crackled and spit sparks into the air, floating like shooting stars until they burned themselves out.

  Once the fire burned bright enough, she grabbed paper and pen from her pack and began to write.

  Here’s what I know:

  We found three keepers in the chain. We hold three verses of the rhyme.

  The keep remains a mystery. No one’s sure if it exists, or knows what’s hidden inside.

  In addition to the scrolls, I carry a map. At least five of the towns listed are real—I’ve visited every one. Does this far-off Riverbend exist as well? To find out, I must spend the next two weeks of my life sleeping on hard ground.

  What then? How many more towns? How many more keepers? What if the chain broke long ago? Will our quest never end?

  Or will the deacons hunt us down first, long before we have a chance to change the world? Will our sacrifices be in vain?

  ***

  Orah referred to the map several times a day, matching landmarks to symbols on the paper—her only proof of progress. By charting their location, she never worried about wandering off course. Such a simple idea. So helpful. If the keep housed more ideas like this, perhaps its discovery would justify their trials.

  Now, as this leg of their journey neared its end, each landmark seemed to bring Riverbend closer. The sooner, the better.

  Ants had found their way into a packet of food and, as a result, their provisions ran low. A weary Thomas whined constantly about the size of his rations, and her own stomach had begun to growl by mid-afternoon.

  At last, a cemetery of the kind that sat on the outskirts of so many towns signaled their arrival. A waist-high wall surrounded it, with a stone arch providing the only entrance. Orah pulled her friends inside.

  The gravestones bore witness to Riverbend’s past. Some stood knee-high, while others rose as obelisks with a sculpture of the sun on top. Some inscriptions remained legible, while others had been worn smooth by weather and time. In the back, the oldest stones had crumbled, the latest generation having no cause to maintain them. Nearest the gate lay a fresh plot, the ground moist and mounded, as yet unmarked by a headstone.

  She directed Nathaniel and Thomas to sit with their backs to the wall, out of sight from the road, while she crouched before them. “We’ve seen little of the Temple since Bradford, so you might be tempted to take chances, but with words flying through the air, we need to be wary.”

  “Come on, Orah,” Thomas said, gesturing to the cluster of homey cottages in the distance. “This place seems more like Great Pond than Temple City.”

  She sniffed the breeze as if to gain a sense of the town, but only the dank odor of freshly turned earth came to her. She shook her head. “Too risky.”

  “It does feel more like the Ponds,” Nathaniel said. “No deacons, and we haven’t met a soul in days.”

  “Oh, Nathaniel, don’t you start being irresponsible too. We mustn’t—”

  Thomas jumped up. “I’m going in. I’ve slept on hard ground for two weeks, and we’ve nearly run out of food. The shadows are deepening. If we wait much longer, we’ll end up hungry and sleeping in a graveyard.”

  Orah looked at Nathaniel, pleading silently for support, but he stood as well and accompanied Thomas out the gate. She glared after them, but then surveyed her surroundings. Not wishing to be left alone in a cemetery, she followed.

  ***

  Orah had to concede that Riverbend did feel familiar, with friendly people and pathways easy to navigate. After a two-minute walk, the dirt road they’d traveled upon passed through the heart of the town, becoming its main street. On one side stood a modest inn and on the other, three single-story shops.

  A cask hung above the nearest doorway, the mark of a cooper. The next had a bowl and mug, which, along with the smoke from its kiln, indicated a potter. Much to Orah’s relief, the third displayed a shoe that precisely matched the symbol on the scroll. Perhaps for once, they’d find an uneventful episode in their journey to the keep.

  Inside, shoes and boots lay scattered across the shelves, and the smell of leather filled the air. In one corner stood a workbench, covered with scraps of hide and an assortment of tools. A girl sat there, tapping away with hammer and awl at a half-soled boot. She glanced up when they entered.

  Her youthful face showed she had not yet come of age, and curls hung down to the middle of her back. A white mourning sash lay across her gray vest, and the rims of her eyes appeared raw and red.

  An apprentice, for sure. Orah lowered her voice out of respect for the grieving girl. “Excuse me. Is the master shoemaker here?”

  The girl set down her tools and rose to greet them, almost making a curtsy. “If you mean my father, no. He’s gone.”

  “When will he be back?” Nathaniel said.

  Her voice quivered. “He’s gone and will never return. He died two weeks ago and I’m alone.”

  Orah shuddered as she recalled her own father’s passing, and offered the customary response. “May he go to the light everlasting.”

  The girl’s eyes shifted down and to the corners before rising to meet Orah’s gaze. “Thank you, ma’am, but if you please, I’m not sure he’d want your blessing. That wasn’t his way. I’m Lizbeth. I suppose I’m the master shoemaker now.”

  Orah shifted uneasily. Did the keeper pass the scroll on to his daughter, or did he take the secret to his grave? What if we’ve come all this way to find the chain newly broken?

  Lizbeth misread Orah’s discomfort. “Don’t be concerned if you need new shoes. I apprenticed to my father since I was little, and he left me with the best of his tools and skills. You won’t find better workmanship in the North River valley. Let me s
how you my wares.”

  Before she could reach for the shelves, Thomas blurted out what Orah held back. “We didn’t come here for your shoes.”

  Orah tried to cushion his words. “I’m a weaver and, like you, I learned my craft from a loving master. I’m sure your father left much of his skill with you. Excuse us, Lizbeth, we didn’t mean to bother you in your grief.”

  She started to leave, but before she could reach the door, Nathaniel grabbed her arm and whispered, “We need to try.” He spun around to the girl. “Please, we had other business with your father.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “You knew my father? Then you must stay and be my guests. I’d love to speak with anyone who could set his memory firmer in my mind.”

  “I’m sorry,” Orah said. “We never met your father, but we believe he had a passion other than shoes.”

  “My father lived for his craft. He had no other business.”

  Nathaniel’s shoulders sagged, but Orah pressed on. “None? Look deep into your heart, Lizbeth. We’ve traveled far to seek him, and you’re our only hope.”

  The girl staggered back a step. After a moment, her tiny hands curled into fists, and she rose up on the balls of her feet, no longer appearing a child. “He taught me all things are possible. Whatever you had to say to him, you may say to me. We are as one.”

  Orah checked with Nathaniel. When he nodded, she stepped forward and spoke in the same voice she’d used with the spinner. “We have traveled far, but our journey has just begun. The true light drives us on.”

  The girl’s tears began to flow. “He’d waited all his life and now, might I fulfill his wish so soon? I haven’t earned it.”

  Orah grasped her by the arms. “Do you have an answer?”

  Lizbeth steadied herself, lifted her chin and announced, “May you find the end you seek, and may the truth you discover hasten a new beginning.”

  The chain was intact. Relief filled the shop and all embraced.

  After some time, the young keeper pulled away and wiped her eyes. “My father hoped you’d come soon, in his lifetime, or all would be lost. When he fell ill, he berated himself for being weak, for failing the seekers and leaving me with such a burden before my time. He feared if the vicars took me for a teaching, I might reveal the secrets, and so he told me little.”