Aluminum Leaves Read online

  She nodded and straightened back up. Red spots blossomed in her vision, and she nearly fell. He caught her arm and held her upright. She wanted to pull free, but right now she needed the support.

  “Frontera,” she repeated, nodding.

  He let go and stepped away, beckoning. He spoke slowly and gestured behind him. One word she thought she understood. “Camp?”

  He nodded once and stepped back, gesturing again for her to follow.

  She didn’t know if she could trust him, but she didn’t know what else to do. The hunter hounds and Vianovelle could not come through the frontera. She was safe from them, at least.

  She looked over her shoulder. There was no sign of the golden wall of light and no sign of her world. Her hands and scalp stung where the fire had found her.

  Once she had realized she was through the frontera and still alive, she had knelt down in the dark, bumping her knee on some hard object, and pulled open the messenger bag. She reached in, grasping desperately, fingers sliding over the two plastic water bottles and the smooth stainless steel one, the slick wrapping of an energy bar, the lid of the first aid kit, and finally, the bound sheets of metal. Underneath the sheets, she found the aluminum stake her grandmother had insisted be included. Her passport, her cell phone, an emergency blanket, a folding knife, a lighter, a first aid kit, all things that presumed an escape within her own world and not to a different one. After a minute, she started to walk toward a greenish glow, and she swiped on the flashlight on her phone.

  There was copper in her bag. He could sense it. She opened it now and drew out a narrow glass bottle. She unscrewed the top and took several large swallows. To his shock, the glass crinkled and folded inward as she sucked on the spout. She drained it, and the cylinder sprang back to its original shape. He waited, but it did not refill as he had expected it to. She dropped it back into her bag and touched her upper chest. “Eyrin,” she said. “Eyrin,” and followed that with a word that was very close to “Dosmanos.” That was a name he knew.

  “Eyrin,” he said.

  She squinted, then nodded.

  He copied her gesture. “Trevian,” he said.

  She pronounced it strangely, but it was understandable.

  “Trevian Langtree,” he said.

  She had less trouble with his family name. After she repeated it, she said her name again, and it was clear the second name was Dosmanos. It was so strange that it felt like a sign, for those who believed in such. There had been a Dosmanos family in Merrylake Landing once, some cousins to him, but he’d never met them.

  She stepped up alongside him, and he led the way out of the tunnel. The savage blue light in her hand was stronger than his lantern, but she walked gingerly, following his lead out of the tunnel.

  She gasped and paused on the slope of the hill, looking up at the sky. Her head swiveled as she stared. She lowered her gaze to the Ancient city and waved a hand, saying something. He shook his head.

  She said it again, making a circle with her hand.

  “A city of Ancient,” he said. He repeated it, slowly.

  She used a word he didn’t understand. Was it rune? She spoke again, and he thought he caught her meaning.

  “Deserted,” he said. “Destroyed.” He touched his chest. “We prospect.”

  She used a word that sounded like “cavenge.” He didn’t understand, so he just turned and started down the grass-covered hill. She followed, slipping once, but keeping her feet as they descended. The remains of his fire lit his camp. She strode forward, and he barely caught her arm in time, stopping her until he put his protective charm to rest. He gestured to one side of the fire, and she sat.

  The man, Trevian, gave her a battered metal cup of a warm liquid he called “tea.” It tasted like cut grass to Erin, but it helped clear her throat of the smoke, so she sipped gratefully.

  This was a primitive world. She wondered how people survived camped out in these weird ruins. Trevian scavenged here, he said. He’d said “prospect.” Trying to be unobtrusive, she looked around at his camp. The centerpiece was a rickety shelter made of two grayish sheets of metal that looked like aluminum. He wore a length of iron rebar, about an inch and a half thick, tied to his belt. She guessed it was a weapon. She glanced without meaning to at the hill they’d climbed out of, the tunnel she had come through.

  She cleared her throat. “Safe. Do you understand ‘safe’? Is it safe here?”

  He touched his broad-brimmed brown hat, where metal glinted, random scraps of old copper. He pointed in one direction, then the other, and then behind him. “Safe,” he said.

  Was he telling her his hat was protecting them? “Do you have hunter hounds here? Hunter hounds?”

  He stared at her without answering or moving his head. He didn’t understand the term, and she didn’t know how to explain it. He asked a question. When she stared, unable to turn the words to meaning, he asked again, pointing at the hill behind her. He made a running sign with the two fingers of his left hand.

  “Chasing me? Yes. Hunter hounds,” and she copied his running fingers. “Other side of the frontera.”

  “Hunter howound? What?” he said.

  Erin thought. She didn’t know this world’s folklore, if they had predatory animals, or their stories of monsters. “Beasts,” she said. “Monsters.”

  He asked a question, and she heard the word “elemental.”

  “Elementals,” she said, drawing out each syllable. “Yes. Elementals.”

  He stood up. Erin flinched back before she realized it. He went into the lean-to and squatted down, reaching for something inside. He pulled out something and brought it over to her.

  She reached out slowly. It was a sheaf of cream-colored paper, flecked with scraps of wood, heavier than the newsprint pads she’d seen in art stores. He handed her a stick with a blunt tip. When she stared, he made a circular motion over the paper. He wanted her to draw.

  As best she could, she sketched out a hunter hound. She showed it to him. He raised an eyebrow. Next to it, she drew a cloud, like smoke, and then the head and forelegs of the creature. When he frowned, confused, she pointed to his fire pit, then tapped the paper.

  He knelt next to her. She pointed to the fire again. “They come with fire,” she said.

  “Fire elementals? No,” he said.

  She stared. “Yes.”

  He shook his head, which apparently meant “no” in this world too, and reached into his trousers pocket. He had an odd belt, braided or woven of colored cords in white, red, green, blue, yellow, and black. They looked familiar, but her attention was drawn to the silvery metal disk he held out her. It was bigger than a quarter, and there was a shape on the back, like three Ss rising from a common root. He tapped it. “Fire elemental,” he said.

  She reached out for the disk. It was lighter than she expected. She turned it over and looked at the other side. A large numeral 5 took up the center, and around the edge were letters she could read. Cinco. White Bluffs. 323. It was a coin.

  They not only knew about elementals, they put them on their money.

  “White Bluffs?”

  Trevian ignored the question, taking the coin and flipping it over. “Fire elemental.”

  She tapped her picture. “Fire elemental, too.”

  He shrugged and tucked away the coin. “You are protected here,” he said.

  “White Bluffs?” she said. If they did print money there, it might be a governmental center, and there would be someone who would know what to do with the book and the compass she carried. “White Bluffs is close?”

  His expression went deliberately blank, and he stood, turning away. He said something that she understood, a second later, as, Are you hungry?

  She stood up. She spoke slowly. “Not safe here. I need to find…a city. A place where people know about, about…” She hesitated over the next words. She didn’t want to say to this stranger that she was carrying magical artifacts. She was alone out here with him.

  “You
are safe here,” he said.

  “Because you say so?”

  His eyes narrowed again. She bent down and picked up the drawing. “These. They kill. They killed my family.”

  He straightened up and put his hand on his heart. He spoke softly. May they have a good journey. She thought that was what he said. For a moment she felt off-balance and her throat swelled.

  He said, again, “You are protected here.”

  “How?”

  “This space is charmed,” he said. Even after she deciphered the words, which clearly came from English if they had a town named White Bluffs, wasn’t sure she understood what he was saying.

  “Charmed? Like…a spell? Like magic?”

  He watched her lips closely. When she finished, he hesitated. “…Yes,” he said. “Magic is an old word. From before the world turned. Before the elementals.”

  “You have many…elementals here?” This world had active elemental magic. There would be people here who understood the book she carried and how to use it.

  Her stomach dropped, and she got cold suddenly. What if Vianovelle could find a way to control the elementals here from her world?

  Trevian was talking, though, and she forced herself to listen. She was adjusting to the cadence of his speech, and more and more words were familiar.

  “We have many elementals, small and large. Most are no harm to us. Many are useful, like the sprites. Earth elementals are dangerous. They try to eat us.”

  She was sure she hadn’t understood that correctly.

  “Fire elementals, dangerous but useful,” he said.

  She nodded. “Fronteras? You understand fronteras?”

  “Doors to other worlds, linked to us, some like ours, some not.”

  She pointed to herself. “I’m from one of those worlds.”

  He showed no surprise. “I thought you were an out-of-worlder. Your dress, your speech, are strange, and that tunnel ends with no openings or turns. I’ve prospected it.”

  “Elementals chased me here,” she said. “They are driven by someone who wants to rule the linked worlds.”

  “Fire elementals can be captured or contained, Erin. They cannot be ruled. They are not like caballos or sheepdogs.”

  Erin clenched her teeth at his tone. “That’s not true. They can.” She had not endured all this just to be subjected to mansplaining. She had wasted years of her life studying elementals and “charms,” and it was an effort to keep from reaching into her bag, opening up the book, and showing him the facts.

  “Perhaps,” he said. She knew he was saying it to end the discussion, not because he believed her. “But you are safe here now. We will talk more in the light. Are you hungry?”

  “No.” She cast a look up at the strange sky above, dark with its rippling bands of luminous pale green and blue, like pictures she’d seen of the aurora borealis…only stretching from horizon to horizon. She hadn’t thought she was tired, but fatigue dragged her down as she stood staring. She hoped she was safe with him, with this rangy guy who was only a few years older than her. He was Chip’s age, maybe, if Chip had lived, so maybe twenty-four? Maybe she’d rest for a few hours, and then head out on her own. If only she had some idea where to go. “I’d like to sleep.”

  “You may have the shelter.”

  “No, thanks. I’m fine out here.” She sat back down, which put her at eye level with his belt. Before he turned away, she recognized the material. They looked like strands of insulated wire.

  Erin refused the shelter, but she did accept one of his blankets. He thought there would be no sign of her come morning, that she would vanish like a character in a fireside tale.

  My fireside tale, he thought. I meet a woman from another world, and the first thing she says is, “How far to White Bluffs?” as if my family sent her.

  As if he would never escape his lineage, his name.

  A few, only a few, could cross the fronteras. That was what the tales all said, anyway. He remembered drowsy nights at his grandmother’s sheep station, in the flatlands, the fire glowing, his grandmother’s light, high-pitched voice, tale-telling about the labyrinth, the worlds linked together like smooth stones on a string, and those rare travelers who leaped from world to world. There were other stories too, of course, ribald tales of the trickster Cheviot the Ram, who was said to be part air elemental, but the tales of those who danced across the fronteras held his interest the most. If Erin was one such, she was not well-prepared for such journeys.

  It was at his grandmother’s that he had found copper for the first time. His father had sent him for a year to his mother’s people. He had gone out under a greenish moon one night tracking a lost lamb, which he never found. As he trod the dark flats, a sense of peace, of happiness, flowed up from the soles of his feet through his body. In a decline covered by tough scrub he found a cache. Bright-colored cords dropped into his hands in a dense clump, twined, knotted, tangled, some spiraling in tight coils. Beneath the nest of cords, he found steel and loomin. He brought pack-loads back to his grandmother’s village. For his sister Aideen and her maids, he brought home several Ancient trinkets. For his father, he brought nothing.

  The colored cords made his belt now. A reminder.

  His father’s voice, cold and cutting, filled the shelter. “The Langtrees need no copper-hunters. We need a leader, Trevian, not some moonlight lamb scratching through the trash of the old world.”

  He twisted, and the dream changed. He drifted in a copper boat on a still surface of a lake, barren peaks rising on three sides around him. Floods of golden sprites ebbed and surged atop the water, the way they had when he was a child. As they grew closer, he heard them whistling, calling, the tone dropping from a whistle to a shriek, then a call, his name. “Trevian! Trevian, wake up!”

  He woke, clutching his knife. Erin stood in the opening to the shelter, and behind her the sky glowed with flame.

  “They’re here! They came through!”

  He sat up. She stepped out of his way as he came out of the shelter. Twin tongues of flames danced at the edge of his boundary. They darted forward, striking, recoiling. The air hissed and rang. Erin clutched the strap of her pouch with both hands.

  “We’re safe,” he told her. “The charm is holding.” In the painful light he could see that her eyes were wide.

  Twining around each other, the elementals withdrew. He watched them fade from harsh white to yellow, to a dull orange, finally to smoke. “There, you see?” he said. They looked young to be away from the emberbed, and he’d never seen jovenes attack that way before. “They’re gone.”

  “They’re not,” she said. Her voice shook.

  He blinked, waiting for his vision to adjust to the dark. Beyond the boundary, the Ancient city filled with rustling, pinging, chiming such as he’d never heard before.

  “How did they come through?” she said.

  “They’re just—jovenes. Young ones,” he said. “They—” Metal rang out in the dark, striking metal. Smoke roiled, condensing. From out of it, a clawed foot appeared, banded in scrap metal. Scraps of Ancient flew through the dark, melding with the smoke. A long blunt head with rows of coppery, gleaming teeth parted the smoke, and a beast the size of a large sheepdog crouched and flung itself, snarling, at the boundary of the camp. Trevian staggered, pain stabbing through his bones as it hit the boundary. Erin caught his arm. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded, but a second beast, coiled metal and smoke, sprang, and he felt the hit down to his marrow.

  “It won’t hold,” she said, and for a moment he didn’t know what she meant.

  “It will,” he said, although, in truth, he didn’t know. The charm had never faced an assault like this.

  The creatures wove back and forth in front of the boundary, the air crackling around them. From the east, a shrill whistle split the air.

  As one, their heads lifted, and they turned south. The one on the right bounded away.

  “Where’s it going?” said Erin.

&n
bsp; In the darkness, the whistling ended, chopped off. A man screamed.

  “No,” Trevian said. He ran for the edge of the camp.

  “Don’t leave me here!” Erin started toward him.

  He put the charm to sleep. He glanced back. The remaining creature loped toward them. Trevian seized Erin’s arm and pulled her along with him. “Cosigan!” he shouted. A cry of pain was the response. “Hold on!”

  The creature chasing them lunged, then veered away, its head moving from side to side. Greenish light glinted on its metal teeth. It made a sound like metal tearing and backed away from him. It started forward again, but Trevian didn’t bother to look as he ran. His charm was protecting him, perhaps both of them. They ran, the beast at their heels.

  The glow around Cosigan’s camp did not come from his camp fire. It came from the second beast, who stood over the supine prospector, its head buried in his chest, sheathed in orange flame. Cosigan wasn’t a copper-hunter. His protective charm had been good enough to stop people, kiotes, and young earth elementals. It was a strong charm, but not strong enough. The creature had broken through.

  Behind him came the crackling of burning wood.

  Erin dropped his hand and turned.

  “No!” he shouted. She had pulled something out of her pouch, a T-square shape of whitish metal. She was beyond the protection of his amulet now. As the second beast bounded forward, she crouched, holding the T-square with the point up. Trevian floundered to a stop. Turn back, or go to Cosigan? The beast leaped, and Erin drove the spike up toward its chest.

  The beast made a sound that rang through the night, drowning out the distant shouts behind it. Erin flew through the air, landing with a thud a few paces from Trevian. Fire spurted from the slash in the creature’s hide. Trevian scooped up a handful of powdery earth. He ran closer. The wounded thing snarled at him but did not approach. The voices behind them grew louder.

  He threw the earth into the wound. Black smoke boiled out, and the beast’s howl made the air around his ears shiver. He grabbed a double handful of earth and threw it. Erin was on her knees now, scooping up a handful of earth, too.