Aluminum Leaves Read online

  “Behind you!” she shouted. He glanced over his shoulder. The other beast was advancing. At her yell, it turned its head toward her and charged. Trevian stepped back to put himself between the charging thing and Erin. His protection charm was holding, but if he stopped fighting the wounded one, it would turn on the prospectors who were coming up behind it. If he continued, he’d leave Erin defenseless against the one that had attacked Cosigan.

  A crossbow quarrel buried itself in the wounded creature’s flank. Trevian’s ears rang from the sound it made.

  He jumped back and caught Erin’s arm. She gasped in pain. He thrust her behind him and turned to face the second beast. Its orange lips curled away from metal teeth, and its eyes glowed a shade of blue he’d never seen.

  Another loomin-tipped quarrel hissed out of the dark.

  The creature danced aside and turned its head toward its wounded fellow. It ran to the wounded one’s side, and as the crowd of armed prospectors advanced, the creatures swirled around each other. Scraps of Ancient shot out in a circle, and the beasts vanished.

  Their voices filled the night.

  “What was that?”

  “Trevian, what were those?”

  “Were those Ancient machines?”

  He murmured to Erin, “Can you walk?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Best not speak,” he said. He took her arm again, and she pulled away with a hiss. Louder, he said, “I’ve never seen such. They attacked Lars.”

  He led the way over to where Cosigan lay. The others followed, clutching crossbows, knives, iron rods, and loomin-clad clubs. Prospectors would go to drastic lengths to best one another, to trick one another, to steal one another’s claims, but they would all come when a whistle signaled an attack.

  Cosigan was dead. His chest was torn open, the ribs cracked and blackened. His heart was gone.

  Chapter Three

  The prospectors crowded around. Dorotea pushed through and knelt at Cosigan’s side. She glared up at Trevian. “An earth elemental did this,” she said, “But those things looked like kiotes.”

  “Bigger,” he said. “The shape of a large dog, made of fire.”

  She stood and gestured down. “Fire doesn’t do this,” she said. “Look at those bones, they’re cracked in half.”

  “Look at the charring,” he said.

  She stared down for a moment without speaking. “Good journey and deep rest,” she murmured, and drew off a thin chain from around her neck. “Lars prayed to the Mother,” she said, kneeling again. “That thing, did you drive it off?”

  “We wounded one of them,” Trevian said, speaking clearly. “Maybe both.” The crowd reacted.

  “Both?”

  “How many?”

  “What brought this?”

  “There were two,” Trevian said.

  Dorotea wrapped the chain around the prospector’s wrist. Without looking up, she said, “And who’s that with you?”

  “My cousin, Erin Dosmanos.”

  A man from the crowd spoke. “We’ve never seen her before.”

  “She came today.”

  Dorotea stood up and approached them. She studied Erin, who stared back calmly. “You’re strangely dressed, Orita Dosmanos.”

  “She’s a flatlander, from the sheep station where my grandmother lived,” he said. “She’s turvy, doesn’t speak.”

  The man who’d spoken crowded up to the front, and Trevian saw without surprise that it was Felipe. “She arrived today, and those things appear tonight?”

  “Rest it, Felipe,” Dorotea said. “We saw her face that thing with nothing but a loomin stake. Although I’d swear I heard her call out to you, Trevian.”

  “I said she doesn’t speak. Not that she can’t.”

  “It doesn’t mean she didn’t draw them here in some way,” Felipe said.

  “I want to pay Lars his honor,” Dorotea said, “and I want to be sure those things are gone.”

  “They could not break through my charm,” Trevian said. “Dorotea, you’re a copper-hunter. Your charms are stronger. Let people share your camp tonight. My cousin and I, we’ll keep to ourselves. If those things are after her, that should draw them away from you. And we know loomin and earth wounds them.”

  “I don’t see how that can be,” Dorotea said, but she turned and pointed into the crowd, first to one man, then another. “Let’s bring Lars back to my camp,” she said. “We’ll discuss things further at dawn.”

  Trevian helped carry Cosigan back to Dorotea’s camp. Erin stayed at his shoulder and didn’t speak. She paused to stare at Dorotea’s sprite lamps, and in the golden light he saw the cloth was seared away from her right sleeve and fluid seeped from red welts. He helped lay out Cosigan and stood for a few moments at the prospector’s feet, wishing him a good journey and a deep rest. “Come,” he said to Erin, and led her back to his claim.

  “What’s ‘turvy’ mean?”

  “Not right in the wits. Turned around.”

  “What’s an orita?”

  “An unmarried woman.”

  She nodded. “That guy who was talking about me, he doesn’t like you.”

  “He doesn’t. He envies me, and I…we have little in common.”

  “You have magic.”

  “Of course. No one’d be here without at least one charm.”

  “So did your friend, but their charm didn’t work.”

  He felt the guilt of Cosigan’s death like a blow. “Mine is stronger. I’m a copper-hunter.”

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “Those things came through after me, except I don’t know how they came through.”

  “Some powerful magic. They aren’t from here,” he said. “They must be from your world. Sit down, and I’ll tend to that burn.”

  “They’re not from my world,” she said, “and never mind, I’ve got a…” and she said three words that confused him. He didn’t know what a first egg kit was. She set down the loomin stake and opened the bag. The pleasant sense of copper washed over him. She took out a shiny white box and opened it. The contents seemed strange until she squeezed a clear unguent onto the burns. It was a healer’s pouch she carried, nothing to do with eggs. She unwrapped a flimsy bandage. He helped her apply it.

  “You have copper in that bag,” he said.

  She scooped up the loomin stake and held it ready.

  “I tell you that only to show what being a copper-hunter is,” he said. “I can sense it. Dorotea, she says she can smell it. We find copper and gold more easily than others, and charms work more powerfully for us. Many copper-hunters don’t prospect at all, they make a living by powering charms for others. Lars, Felipe, they use their wits and their muscles alone to find copper. It is no virtue of mine that makes the protecting charm stronger, just something I was born with.”

  “What’s the name of this place?” she said.

  “This place? It’s a vast city of Ancient. I don’t know its name. It lies within the Crescent.”

  “The Crescent,” she said. She tipped back her head to look at the sky. “How far north are we?”

  “North? Not so far.”

  “Hmm.” She reached into a gap in the seam of her jacket and pulled out a thin rectangle. Its black sides were scratched and scuffed. He recognized it. He had seen hundreds, maybe more, of them. Whatever purpose they had served, they had been as common as shoes to the Ancient.

  “I fell on this,” she said. “You call it the Ancient, but it doesn’t seem so old to me.” She set it on her knee and drew something out of the bag that boasted copper. It was an identical black rectangle, only hers was shiny and smooth. “This one’s mine,” she said.

  He nodded. “What does it do?”

  “Not much, now,” she said. She turned it over, and he shaded his eyes from the barrage of color and light. “We communicate with them, but it won’t work here. It needs…radio waves and towers that transmit the waves. We stored information on them. We…listened to music, we gathered information, we ca
ptured images. They showed us where we were and how to get where we needed to be.”

  He laughed. She looked serious, but he couldn’t help it.

  “Far greater charms, magic, than any of our own,” he said. “Show me.”

  “I can’t. It needs a, a network. A community of towers and other phones. And those are on the other side of the frontera.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “I can show you a picture,” she said. She touched something with her thumb, then swiped it across the face of the rectangle. “Here,” she said. “Here’s me with my family last Fourth of July.”

  She turned it so the bright-colored side faced him. The four people were shrouded in blue, white, and red. Erin sat next to an older woman with the same wavy black hair and eyes as Erin. Behind them stood two dark-haired men. The younger was nearly bald, but his eyes and the shape of his chin showed his relationship to Erin. Their mouths were open as if they were laughing. He had never seen a portrait composed is such a way or painted so finely.

  “Are they on the other side of the frontera?”

  “They’re dead,” she said. “All dead now, except me.”

  “Good journey to them, and deep rest,” he said.

  “Do you have mirrors here?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  “I mean, do you know what you look like?”

  That was a baffling question. He was quite aware of his cow eyes, his lank hair. “Of course,” he said.

  She held up the device in front of his face. A circle of white light swelled, and he blinked. Then she turned it. The greenish blob in his vision faded, and he looked. That was certainly his hat, but he hadn’t realized his nose was such a mountain peak. “Did you just create that?”

  “Yes,” she said. She fiddled with it some more. “Once the charge runs out, it’ll be as useless as the ones you have lying around here.”

  His ear was starting to adapt to her strange accent, even if some words made little sense. He could understand her, at least most of the time, if not all.

  “Erin…” He hesitated. “Do you believe that you have traveled from the past?” Surely she knew that frontera only led from one world to another. “From the Ancient?”

  She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. The fronteras link worlds, not the future or the past. You seem more…primitive than me, but our languages are similar.” She waved a hand. “This looks a lot like what I just left.”

  Primitive? She was arrogant for someone who couldn’t correctly identify an elemental or grasp what a charm was. Before he could speak, she said, “Trevian, I need to move on. Your friends don’t want me here, and I need guidance, help. I need a city or a town. I need someone who understands elementals and the fronteras.”

  “Why? What is so urgent?”

  “If the hounds come back, your friends won’t be safe. I won’t be safe, and more importantly, what I carry won’t be safe either. Your world will be at risk, and so will mine.”

  “What do you carry?” he said.

  The burn on her arm had settled down to a steady throbbing. It hadn’t seemed possible that once she crossed the frontera things would get even worse, but she was starting to wonder. The hunter-hounds had followed her here, something that should not have been possible, either.

  Trevian’s rival had already made a connection between her and the hounds. They’d already killed an innocent person here. She didn’t understand how they had come through, or why people here had recognized them so quickly, when Trevian kept saying they weren’t elementals.

  In spite of everything she had learned about fronteras, this seemed to be Earth—her Earth—her future. It was a future in which cities were dead and technology was…well, she didn’t know how the technology was. Maybe the cities had radio, electricity, and cars. They seemed to have the crossbow down pretty well, but not a single prospector had pulled out a gun. If this was Earth, she wasn’t even sure what continent she was on. And that aurora borealis sky argued that this wasn’t Earth at all.

  She didn’t know if she could trust Trevian. He had tried to protect her. For a moment, it even seemed like he had chosen to protect her over his friend. He had risked himself both for his friend and for her—but he was a prospector. Didn’t that mean he made a living finding things of value? If she showed him the book of aluminum leaves, would he try to take it?

  She fished in the bag for the second bottle of water, just to give herself time to think. Seeing his expression, she held the bottle out to him. “Water?”

  He reached for it slowly, sniffed it, and took a swallow. “Strange,” he said, “but good. What is this?” He tapped the bottle.

  “Plastic. Like the first aid kit. I have this too, though.” She lifted out the steel water container. He ran a finger down it.

  “Steel,” he said.

  She nodded. “Do you make steel?”

  “Make…? No. We shape what we find. Is that what those creatures are pursuing?”

  She studied his face. “Do you think so?”

  “No. There is still copper in there. And loomin. Loomin can hold elementals, everyone knows that.”

  “Hmm.” She pressed the bag closer to her side. “Does everyone here know about the fronteras?”

  “Fronteras, and the Families, are a fireside tale.”

  She felt her chest open up. “The Families? You know about them?”

  “My mother’s mother told me of them, the year I lived in the flatlands.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He shrugged and resettled his hat on his head. “There are many worlds,” he said, “Strung together like beads, and in some places they touch, and a frontera opens between them. Long ago, in the days of the Ancient, before the world turned and the elementals found their freedom, there were the four Families, and they skipped between the worlds like dancers.”

  “You think they came from here?”

  He dipped his head. “The people of the Ancient fed upon the elementals. Then the world turned. The ways between the worlds were lost to all but a few. The Families had tools made to mark the way and unlock the fronteras, and some that controlled the elementals. Some say the tools were made long before the elementals found their freedom, but that’s not how my grandmother told it.”

  “Are there Families here, Trevian? Any left?”

  “In the stories, there is always a lone survivor.”

  “Where would that survivor be?”

  He spoke gently and slowly. “It is a story, Erin. A fireside tale.”

  “You know it’s not,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “In my world there are four Families,” she said. “We guard four tools, magical objects. Or we did. Two families are dead now. Three years ago, more or less, a man came to our world. He said his name was Vianovelle, and he was from an elemental world.” She paused, waiting to see if he understood her words. When she was sure he did, she went on. “He wanted to meet with the Wings, and when they refused, they were murdered in their home. Only one escaped, and we think she went through her frontera. Then he killed the Carews and took their artifact. The Augustos, they live in Florida, they’ve disappeared and so has their artifact. And my family was murdered tonight, or last night, I guess. In a firestorm, with winds like we’ve never seen. And those…things came. Everyone’s dead now but me.”

  “So that’s what you hold,” he said, “one of the Ancient tools.”

  “I guess so.”

  He stood up and began to walk back and forth, not looking at her. “In some of the tales of the Families, there is one named Dosmanos.”

  Erin blinked, trying to process what she had heard. “Are you joking? Mocking me?”

  “No mockery. There is a Dosmanos family name in the Crescent. In fact, there are Dosmanos in my family line.” He fell silent for a moment. “You must live close to each other, the Four Families?”

  She snorted. “Hardly. The Wings live, lived, in Taiwan. The Augustos were in Florida. T
hat’s clear across the continent from me, and the Carews were in Canada. We moved, after the Carews disappeared, to be closer to a known frontera.”

  “You said you spoke. Was that a figure of speech, then? Do you mean you wrote letters?”

  “No. We talked four times a year, and Remedios Augusto and my grandmother were friends. They Skyped once a week. They shared recipes and talked about Downton Abbey.” Remedios Augusto always quoted Lady Violet, and both women would laugh. The memory didn’t bring tears, just a deep emptiness.

  “Scraped?”

  “No, Skyped… The machine I took your picture with? It lets us see and talk to people over long distances. Remedios even sent my grandmother a picture of Vianovelle that Wing Mei sent her. Not that it helped.”

  “Miracle tales,” he murmured.

  “Just technology. You said there are Dosmanoses here. Are they magical? Could they help us? And where do they live?”

  “I don’t know. The last of the Dosmanos clan that I knew of lived in Merrylake Landing. She invented the machinery that lets us have sprite carts. Merrylake Landing is mostly in ruins now, I hear. I don’t know where she would have gone.”

  “What destroyed it? Elementals?”

  He laughed. It wasn’t a joyous sound. “Oh, no. We did. White Bluffs did. Anyway, I was planning to go there, before you arrived, for other reasons.”

  “I’m going with you,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  Erin wanted to leave at once. He tried to persuade her to wait until it was closer to dawn. Since it seemed the hunter hounds were of fire, the river might be the safest way to travel, and they could rent a boat in Lily Bend. As comfortable as he was within his own claim, the Ancient site was not safe to walk in darkness, and he feared the creatures, the hounds, would be back.

  She feared that too, which was why she wanted to start now.

  They ended up waiting until an hour before dawn. He packed up what he could, and she helped him. He gave her one of his jackets and one of his knives. The length of iron swung against his hip.