Trapped

7: HORSE HEROES

Half an hour later, we were back with the horses: watching disheveled grooms saddle six mounts so we could head off to Dover-on-Sea.

Five of the horses were for those of us who'd been present in The Pot of Gold: Myoko, Pelinor, Impervia, the Caryatid, and me. Chancellor Opal had decided if we were destined to go on a quest, that's what we should do — hie ourselves down to the docks and quest for Sebastian.

Hence, the five mounts. Plus one for Annah. Who hadn't been ordered to accompany us and hadn't said she wanted to go, but was following close enough on our heels that the stablehands assumed she belonged to our party. I couldn't tell if she'd truly intended to accompany us or was just letting herself be swept along — Annah had retreated to her usual shy passivity, silently lurking in the background while everyone else chattered. From time to time I tried to catch her eye… but she had far too much experience withdrawing from the world for me to dent her self-isolation.

It didn't help that the rest of our group were being their noisy selves, arguing over which horses they should take. Of the six of us, I was the only one who actually possessed a mount of my own: a sturdy white gelding named Ibn Al-Hahm. Despite his name, Ibn was not an Arabian — he was an Appaloosa I'd bought when I arrived on this continent. However, his characteristic Appaloosa splotches were small and restricted to his hindquarters; when I was seated on him, he looked much like a purebred white stallion I used to ride on our family estate.

Everyone else in our party had to make do with animals owned by the school itself. Pelinor couldn't bear to buy a mount for himself unless it was absolutely perfect… and if there is such a thing as a perfect horse, it can't be purchased on a teacher's salary. Impervia, of course, had taken a vow of poverty; I wasn't clear on the specifics, but it certainly ruled out expensive possessions like horses. As for Myoko, she claimed she was too small to ride anything bigger than a pony; when asked why she didn't buy a pony, she gave an Impervia-style sniff and said ponies were beneath an adult woman's dignity.

Perhaps she just didn't like riding — that was certainly the Caryatid's excuse. The Caryatid, despite her roly-poly figure, displayed an obsession for walking: to her, horses were fine for pulling plows, but if you wanted to get somewhere, it was vastly more enjoyable to use your own two legs. The rest of us were hard-pressed to persuade her we shouldn't head for Dover on foot… but eventually, under the weight of "Time is of the essence," the Caryatid grudgingly agreed to ride.

At least we all could ride; our chancellor "strongly encouraged" every teacher to learn the basics. This policy was eminently practical — student groups went on numerous field trips throughout the year, whether to Feliss City (where Governor Niome would attempt to charm the brats with talk about "trade opportunities in our fair province") or around the countryside to see notable sights like Niagara Falls, the concrete ruins of Trawna, or just the color of the autumn leaves. These outings had to be supervised… and Opal didn't want any teacher avoiding the job with, "Oh, I can't ride."

Therefore, we all knew which end of a horse was the front, how to cinch a saddle, and when to let one's mount rest. We also rode regularly on the school's private horses to keep our thigh muscles in shape. (I don't know if any out-of-shape rider has actually died of stiffness the day after a long trip, but many have wished they could.) Even the Caryatid went for a canter several times a week; apparently, stints on horseback weren't immoral in themselves, you just weren't supposed to substitute them for walking. As for Myoko, she did look tiny, even on the school's smallest quarter horse, but she never had trouble controlling the animals she rode. If her size caused a problem, the only sticking point was her pride.

We received no formal send-off: everyone else was searching for Sebastian. Opal had rallied all available staff and faculty to scour the immediate neighborhood for signs of the boy. The grooms who saddled our horses were in a hurry to join the hunt — they hung around long enough to make sure we got mounted, then hastened into the night. Heaven knows why they were so eager to blunder through the muddy countryside; maybe they just wanted to get it over with, so they could then return to bed.

Whatever the explanation, we were left alone in the stable yard — dark except for the stars and a torch-sized flame sitting on the Caryatid's shoulder like a parrot. None of us believed this was just a quick trip to the lake. We were embarking on a quest; who knew when or if we'd return?

It was Pelinor who finally broke the silence. "There's no reason to be glum," he said. "We aren't heroes, are we?"

Impervia lifted an eyebrow. "What do you mean by that?"

"Well…" He gave his mustache a suck. "Quests go one of two ways: either the company dies off one by one until the hero is left to save the world single-handed; or everyone else survives and it's the hero who has to make a tragic sacrifice at the end." He looked around at our company. "Since nobody here shows heroic promise, perhaps we'll all come out of this with our skins intact."

"Unless," said Impervia, "God intends to demonstrate that everyone has the potential for heroism. In that case, each of us will be tested to the utmost… and we shall live or die accordingly."

"I'm a teacher," Myoko muttered. "I give tests, I don't take them."

Impervia attempted to blister Myoko with a haughty look. In our holy sister's worldview, no one was immune to the occasional pop quiz administered by heaven.

"Of course," I said, "there's always the chance we won't be bound by the stereotypes of bedtime stories — that things will unfold, devoid of meaning, because we're living in real life!"

Annah, who'd slipped her horse beside mine, gave me the ghost of a smile… but the Caryatid gasped in shock. "Phil," she said, "this isn't real life. This is a quest."

I hoped she was joking; but I couldn't tell for sure.

The main road to Dover-on-Sea was an OldTech asphalt highway, cracked with age and lined with the shadowed hulks of collapsed buildings. Close to town, the buildings were mostly houses: shoddily constructed things, thrown up four hundred years ago when Simka was going through a period of overoptimistic expansion. Armies of aluminized clapboard had marched past the town limits into the countryside, wasting prime farmland; then a few years later, the people in those houses turned tail and ran… most of them heading for outer space, courtesy of the League of Peoples.

The subdivisions fell empty. The townhouses just fell.

I don't think it happened quickly — first the roofs sprang leaks, then the interior wood and plaster began to rot. Birds and mice and carpenter ants took turns nibbling holes for nests. Heavy winter snowfalls made the crossbeams sag; heavy spring rains undermined the foundations; heavy summer thunderstorms blew off shingles and siding; heavy autumn melancholy leached away whatever survival instincts the houses could muster as they slowly crumbled away.

A century of that, and Simka's version of suburbia was fit only for wrens and raccoons. Three centuries more and you could barely recognize the houses at all… but in places, one could still see concrete steps with rusty metal railings leading up to doors that weren't there, and netless basketball hoops standing on poles in the middle of tumble-down trash warrens.

Farther out in the country, the houses were mostly intact: farmers had occupied nearly every OldTech residence and they kept their homesteads in good repair. Admittedly, the houses didn't contain much of their original building materials — everything had been replaced over the past four centuries, except for hardy components like flagstones — but they were still standing in one piece, more or less on the sites where they were first constructed.

Therefore, if you saw a collapsed building in the country, it wasn't a house. It might be an OldTech diner with a paintless tin sign creaking rustily in the wind… or a country church with its spire toppled onto its briar-patch graveyard… perhaps an aluminum barn that once enclosed millions of snow-white mushrooms, still harboring mushroom descendants under heaps of debris.

These ruins were overrun with winter-shrunk weeds — mostly lemon verbena and mint-scented geraniums. The plants were escapees from some garden center four days' journey to the east; they'd been bioengineered for extreme hardiness, and when OldTech culture imploded, the plants had seeded themselves and spread from the greenhouses where they'd originally been developed. Native vegetation couldn't withstand the encroachment: thistles and milkweed and purple loosestrife gave ground before the onslaught. Much of Feliss province was now taken over, anywhere that wasn't kept clear by farmers or gardeners… and on hot summer nights, the tangled smells of lemon and mint would hang thick in the breezeless air.

We rode past it all in silence. There was nothing to say; or if there was, no one wanted to say it. Our horses clopped rhythmically along the age-degraded pavement, pausing now and then when a sound or a scent disturbed them. But nothing attacked us from the darkness — it was still cold enough that coyotes and lynx were mostly hunkered down in their dens, and the few that might be hunting stayed well away from the flame on the Caryatid's shoulder. The sky was a patchwork of clouds and stars with no threat on the horizon…

…until we were a minute away from Death Hotel.

Lovely name, isn't it? Death Hotel. It was a rural landmark halfway between Simka and Dover, one of the few OldTech buildings that was one hundred percent intact. The place was made of granite blocks, carefully chiseled and fitted together into a box-shaped edifice with a halfhearted attempt at a dome on the roof; if that doesn't give you enough of a picture, think, "Big, gray, and ugly." Add to that four centuries of passers-by slathering graffiti on the outside, mostly of the M.G. LOVES S.T. variety, and you've got the idea. At the very front, however, on the wall facing the road, some long-ago hand had painted DEATH HOTEL in big black letters; and over the years, local kids had repainted the inscription whenever it got too faint, in order to preserve the place's "charm."

Death Hotel had a story behind it. In fact, it had many stories, but only one I actually believed. Once upon a time, the place had been built as a mausoleum for some well-off family. Something went wrong — folklore suggested many possibilities, from believable problems like the family going broke, to extravagant hypotheses like a Romany curse or a prophetic vision warning of dire consequences if the tomb was ever used — but whatever happened, no corpse was ever interred within those thick gray walls. Instead, the place became a popular spot for transient workers to sleep while they waited to get hired in the local harvest. Those workers called the place Death Hotel… and eventually one of them painted the name on the outside.

For several years, the hotel grew in fame; on rainy nights, dozens of people took shelter inside, a few sleeping in the wall niches meant for coffins but most just lying on the floor. They never caused any trouble… and most Simka residents were amused by the idea of people sleeping in an empty mausoleum. Alas, a handful of loud-voiced fuddy-duddies called it a "desecration of sacred ground," especially since many of the transients had dark skins or foreign accents. In the end, the party-poopers prevailed upon authorities to brick up the entrances with cinder blocks; and the bricklayers had done such a good job, no one had got inside since.

That didn't end the hotel's popularity with visitors. Folks continued to drop by and write their names on the walls. A few even claimed to see ghosts in the neighborhood. It didn't matter that the place had never contained a single corpse: a mausoleum is a mausoleum even without dead bodies, so why shouldn't people see phantoms there?

Before that night, I'd laughed at yokels who thought Death Hotel was haunted. But after my experience in the music room, I wasn't so ready to smirk… and the closer we got, the itchier I felt. What bothered me most was that we wouldn't be able to see the mausoleum until we were almost upon it — there were tall stands of spruce on both sides that shielded the site, even in winter. For all I knew, an entire un-dead orchestra could be planted on the snowy front lawn, just waiting for us to come into view before they struck up the funeral march from Beethoven's Third.

A hundred meters short of the hotel, I caught myself clutching at Ibn's mane, grabbing so hard the poor horse turned his head to look at me, wondering what I wanted him to do. "Sorry," I whispered, letting go and giving his neck what I hoped was a reassuring pat. Of course, there'd be no ghosts at the mausoleum — as a man of science, I could prove it by probability. The odds of seeing a single ghost must be a million to one, so the odds of seeing two in a single night were so immensely astronomical…

At that moment, something filmy and white streamed down from the sky.

It was a creamy tube of light, glinting with colors like the Aurora Borealis. Green. Gold. Purple. As it shimmered in the darkness, I could see the stars behind: the tube was like glowing milky smoke. It stretched so high it disappeared into the blackness as if it soared beyond our planet's atmosphere — but that was just as terrifying as if the thing were simply a ghost. A ghost could only go, "Boo!" Mysteries from outer space could cause real trouble.

I couldn't help thinking of Opal's story. A Spark Lord. A Lucifer. An Explorer from the galaxy at large.

The upper body of the tube flapped and fluttered like a banner in a stiff wind, but the bottom seemed rooted in place. Though the trees blocked our view, I knew the spectral tube had attached itself to Death Hotel. I could imagine it like a phantom lamprey, mouth spread and locked onto the building's ugly dome; or perhaps the tube was a pipeline that fed ethereally into the sealed-up interior, and even as we watched, it was pumping down a horde of aliens. Or spirits. Or worse.

"Oh look," said Pelinor, pointing at the tube. "Isn't that pretty." Pause. "What is it?"

Nobody answered. The horses stopped one by one, either reined in by their riders or halting of their own accord as they saw the tube twinkling in the sky. The thing fluttered in silence — the whole world had hushed, as if even the horses were holding their breaths. Then, without a whisper, the ghostly tube snapped free of the mausoleum like a broken kite string, and in the blink of an eye it slithered up into the night.

Deep dark quiet. Then, beneath me, Ibn gave a snort that filled the cool air with horse steam. The other horses snorted too, perhaps trying to decide if they should worry or just shrug off what they'd seen. In front of me, Myoko cleared her throat… but before she could speak, an ear-shattering ‹BOOM› ripped the silence.

I had an instant to register that the noise came from the hotel: like a cannon being fired. Then there was no more time for thinking, as Ibn went wild with fear. He reared up whinnying, nearly bashing into Annah's mare, who was doing exactly the same thing. For several seconds, we were swept up in six-horse chaos, the animals trying to bolt, the humans trying not to get tossed off. My leg was slammed hard between Ibn and some other horse, but I couldn't tell whose — it was dark and confusing, voices yelling, "Whoa!" and "Easy!", horses neighing, Ibn lurching in panic as I tried to hang on.

Somehow Ibn got himself turned around and started galloping back toward Simka, his eyes bulging white. I had no choice but to let him run: if I tried to rein him in, he might rear and throw me off. The pounding of hooves behind me suggested the others were in the same situation, letting their horses run until the first burst of terror burned itself out.

Thirty seconds after he'd bolted, Ibn slowed a notch. He still had gallop left in him; but as I pulled lightly on the reins, he didn't resist completely. He didn't stop either: it took another half minute before he let himself be cajoled to a panting halt. Annah cantered past me, still working to slow her mount — she was always very tentative on horseback, just as in life. The other four, however, had got their animals under control; when I turned to look, they were stopped on the road behind me, bending over their mounts and murmuring, "It's all right, it's all right, it's all right."

The Caryatid was closest, only a few paces away. When she noticed me looking at her, she asked in a harsh whisper, "What the blazing hell was that?"

"How should I know?" Down the road, a cloud of dust or smoke drifted above the treetops: the remnants of whatever made that deafening bang. I couldn't see any light shining on the cloud from ground level; with luck, that meant the explosion hadn't started a fire in the surrounding forest.

The Caryatid was still staring at me, her face paler than usual in the glow of her shoulder-flame. "So," she whispered, "do we investigate the boom?"

"Of course we do!" That came from Impervia, riding up to join us. Her face was set in a grim smile, trying not to show too much enthusiasm. As always, she longed to charge straight into trouble, but did her best to hide it.

"We shouldn't get distracted," I said, knowing I sounded like a rationalizing coward. "Our first priority is Sebastian; is there a good reason to waste time on something that has nothing to do with him?"

Impervia made a scoffing noise. "It's got to be part of the same business, Phil. When was the last time we had mysterious deaths or strange things appearing from the sky? Never! And now they're all happening the same night. Everything's connected, and we have to find out how."

Without waiting for an answer, she turned her horse and kicked it into a trot back toward the mausoleum. Her mount, a gray gelding, showed no reluctance to head in that direction; perhaps the stupid beast had already forgotten the bang that made him panic.

The Caryatid gave me a look. "We can't let Impervia go alone, Phil." She tugged lightly on her horse's reins, and started up the road herself.

Sighing, I checked how Annah was doing. She'd got her mare under control and was coming back toward me. "Are you all right?" I asked.

"Fine," she said softly. "You?"

"Fine, fine, fine."

Pelinor and Myoko were fine too — they'd joined Impervia and were riding toward Death Hotel together. Annah's eyes met mine: a look that probably meant something, but in the darkness, I couldn't tell what. "We'd better keep them out of trouble," she murmured.

I nodded. Together we rode forward.