Forever the Road (A Rucksack Universe Fantasy Novel) Read online

  “Like everything else in this world,” Kailash said, “the greatest always look the most ordinary.”

  “Why is that?” Jade asked.

  “They’re too busy doing,” Rucksack smiled, “to worry themselves with putting on a show. Can you tell anything?”

  Jade shook her head. “What voice this had, left with the old man. There’s nothing for me to hear.”

  The old man’s absence was heavier, more noticeable than his presence had ever seemed. I never ate there, Jade thought. Not once. Though that’s probably for the best. I didn’t even try to speak with him, though I saw him all the time. Now he’s gone.

  Jade saw Rucksack’s stare. “You can feel it, can’t you?” he said.

  She nodded. “Feel it. Hear it. It’s everywhere.”

  Mim and Pim looked at each other. “What is?”

  “The fear. The loss,” Jade continued. “If the old man was part of the city’s beginning, the city feels his absence as if part of Agamuskara itself has been cut away. The city is remembering what lies at its heart.”

  “The black temple,” Rucksack said.

  “The Smiling Fire,” Kailash said.

  “Do we have to go down the alley?” Mim asked.

  “Not today,” Jade said. “I just need to listen to it, and I can do that from here.”

  “That’s a relief,” Pim said, laying his hand softly on his chest. “The closer we get to it, to him… these burn. It’s like they’re going to catch flame.”

  Kailash held up her hand. “I don’t know if I can heal you,” she said, “but I can help.”

  “No, you can’t,” Pim said. “Not any more than he could consume us. And for the same reason.”

  “And what reason is that?” Rucksack asked.

  “You really don’t know, do you?” Mim replied.

  “Know what?” Kailash said.

  “Whenever you’ve seen us,” Pim replied, “we can see the question in you: ‘Why do they look familiar?’”

  “The answer is simple,” Mim said. “We used to live among you. In the village.”

  Kailash’s eyes widened. “No!” she said, staring closely. “But you—I know you!” She shook her head. “But how can it be? You were among the first to die.”

  “And he did kill us,” Pim said. “Mostly.”

  “The dia ubh changed us too,” Mim said. “Well, mostly the dia ubh.”

  “Mostly?” Kailash said.

  “We aren’t fully alive,” Pim said. “We aren’t fully dead. We have our own role to play in this world still. That’s why we’re here. That’s why we do what we do. Right down to letting Rucksack and Jay spot us yesterday. But when they chased us to the alley, we don’t know what happened. We neared a red door then all went dark. When we woke, we were inside his temple.”

  “The black temple at the end of the alley?” Rucksack asked.

  Mim nodded. “’You have to be awake,’ he said to us. ‘You have to be aware.’”

  “Did he know who you were?” Rucksack asked. “Did he sense his own lost power in you?”

  Pim shook his head. “Whatever he is, he has forgotten so much of the fire that he remembers little of what he once was or what his strength once was. He sips raindrops and believes he drinks oceans.”

  “We had nowhere to flee to, no way to fight,” Mim continued. “His mouth opened, red and black and somehow larger than his actual being. He approached us. The air was so hot it burned. And then he… Then he tried to take it back.”

  “The fire of life,” Kailash said.

  Pim nodded. “It’s like he wanted not to eat us but to consume us, body and soul, mind and fire. He tried.” Pim looked at his torso and grimaced. “How he tried. But you could say it was as if we gave him indigestion. The fire of life is what he wants, all of it, back under his control. But the fire of life is not the fire that burns in us. He leaped away, as if in agony. In the confusion, we were able to flee. Perhaps he feared us. We do not know but we were able to find a door and return to the city.”

  “Did it… hurt him?” Jade asked. “Weaken him?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mim said. “He is weak, he is afraid, but he is gaining strength and courage. Even afraid, he is as a threatened, cornered animal. He knows now that life is all but completely and forever out of his control. He knows that he has but one chance to regain his former strength, one chance to take back the fire of life.”

  “He knows about the dia ubh?” Rucksack asked.

  “Yes,” Pim said. “But that’s not all. The old man was there.”

  “Alive?” Kailash asked.

  Pim shrugged. “No.”

  Pain rang through Jade, and she saw the same grief etched into the faces of Kailash and Rucksack.

  “We always stopped by when we were in Agamuskara,” Mim said. “Just because you’re not fully alive doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy some of the best food in this world.”

  Rucksack sighed. “The Smiling Fire took the old man from The Mystery Chickpea?”

  “We don’t know why he left,” Pim said. “We just know that he was in the temple and that the Smiling Fire had consumed him. By being in the presence of Jay and the dia ubh, that knowledge now passed to the Smiling Fire. All that knowledge, all that sight… if the Smiling Fire has consumed it and absorbed it, he now sees all the world. He sees the future ahead—what he must do and when he can do it. He knows the mirror eclipse nears. He knows he needs the dia ubh. And he knows about Jay. Jay is in danger.”

  “We’re all in danger,” Rucksack said.

  “Jay worst of all,” Mim replied. “The Smiling Fire knows Jay needs to be there when the dia ubh opens, so the Smiling Fire can kill him. It’s not just the light. Jay’s blood, his soul, already influenced by the dia ubh, combined with the mirror eclipse and the opened dia ubh, will restore the Smiling Fire to all his former power. And more. He’ll destroy the world. He’ll burn all life to cinders and then eat the cinders. The world will be nothing but ash and his smile again.”

  Jade walked over to the walls at the mouth of the alley. She touched her left hand to the white stone. Instead of warmth under the hot sun, a shivering coolness ran through the rock. “It’s as if the very walls of the city are terrified,” she said. No one replied. She closed her eyes and bent her head, listening to the walls of the city.

  The walls saw and heard everything, after all, and always had. These first walls of Agamuskara had been erected years after the black temple’s significance had already begun to fade to an oddity, a mere strange formation at the heart of the city, before falling out of memory entirely. The walls heard the songs and stories fade. So many years, so many tales and feelings, so many lives, all absorbed into the stone’s memory.

  No faces. No sense of identities. To the long, slow life of the stone, distinguishing human faces and lives was as incomprehensible as a person trying to distinguish raindrops during the monsoon.

  She could sense some things though: a young woman, an old man, children chasing a running child. And newer memories. She focused harder.

  The young boy followed the older boy. Both were wrapped in purpose and confusion, doubt and fear. The feelings were so fresh. The younger boy followed the older boy down the alley. But only the older boy had come out again.

  It had to be the first disappearance.

  Next was the old man. He was one of the few things older than the walls, if not older than the stone itself. The wall remembered him for that.

  A sudden fear, a sadness had pulled him away from the cart yesterday. But it was more than that. It was concern. Protectiveness.

  He left out of love, Jade thought, but for who?

  The old man crossed into the alley. Then all was a fog from which he did not emerge.

  No, Jade thought. Not a fog. Smoke from a Smiling Fire.

  The old man faded. Now Jade saw something else. More children came down the alley, but not children who lived there or nearby. Children from around the city. Going down the alley. />
  Not returning.

  It didn’t seem like a memory though. It was more like… a vision, Jade thought. Am I being shown the future, or what the future could be?

  Jade opened her eyes and pulled her hand away from the wall.

  She heard a voice say, “Jade?”

  Turning, she saw Kailash staring at her with deep worry in her ancient eyes. She looks more and more like an older mother, Jade thought. She told them what she had seen.

  “What do we do now?” Kailash asked.

  Jade stared down the alley, looking away from all of them. The tears were starting. Too many lives. The children. The old man. The love she did not know or understand.

  The love I cannot have.

  “We need to get Jay feeling better,” Jade said. “Then Rucksack is going to tell him everything.”

  “What about you?” Rucksack said.

  “What’s happening here is beyond me. Beyond my heart. Beyond what I want. There’s only one thing for me to do,” Jade replied. “I’m going to do my duty.”

  “What do you mean?” Kailash asked.

  Love is not the traveler’s path, Jade thought.

  “Another story for another time,” she said, walking away from the alley, back toward the pub, alone.

  JIGME RAN. The crowds parted fearfully, as if he were a runaway truck. No one bumped into him. No one tripped him. No one who knew him or knew of him sneered at the boy with no father, the boy with the mother who had done wrong.

  And what wrong had she done? Jigme thought. Without a husband, she brought me into the world.

  They could all burn. Burn like the old man had. It had been hard to find the courage, but the Smiling Fire had guided him. From there, Jigme had simply gone back to the living end of the alley, watching from behind a wall as Jay had finished eating and left.

  A strange longing shone from the old man’s dark eyes, as if he badly wanted to tell the tourist something but could not. When he looked away, the longing in Jigme’s stare had caught him.

  Then Jigme had turned down the alley, and the old man had followed. He had even followed Jigme into the temple, without a doubt, without a flinch.

  It wasn’t until they were inside that things had become difficult.

  The old man’s bright eyes had widened when the Smiling Fire loomed over him, and his face contorted with deep terror. Yet he did not try to run. He did not beg or plea. He trembled with fear but soon the old man’s face changed.

  It was as if he were remembering something long forgotten, something that gave him courage and some sort of peace. The Smiling Fire said nothing, only gathered its strength. Moments remained before the old man would be less than ash.

  The old man raised his head and stared into the twin coals of the Smiling Fire’s eyes. He smiled brighter than the flames looming above him. Then he looked away and locked his gaze on Jigme.

  The old man looked at him as if he were trying to say something.

  The Smiling Fire lunged up.

  Old yet vibrant, quavering with separateness and longing, the words came into Jigme’s mind.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Jigme stared deep into his thoughts, which opened like new days inside his mind. There was so much the old man had to say, so much he suddenly wanted to tell Jigme. Why now? After all these silent years, why nothing till now?

  Jigme saw all the times he’d walked by the cart, feeling the brown-and-black eyes staring at him. Not even the day he’d eaten there had the old man tried so hard to communicate with him.

  Now came the cries, the memories, the stories, all surging toward Jigme’s mind like a once-trickling river now swollen with spring rains and winter melt. So much to say. So much to understand.

  One word came racing toward him—not yet distinct, but Jigme focused on it, tried to understand…

  The Smiling Fire crashed down like a wave.

  “No!” Jigme cried, but it was all too late.

  The flood dried up. The thoughts vanished.

  Jigme was alone again.

  Shards of what he had almost learned fell around him and disappeared, unknown and lost forever. A black cloud filled the temple, yet all was so silent. No screams. No words. No sound at all.

  He was trying to tell me something, Jigme thought with sadness and longing, but I couldn’t understand in time.

  The cloud faded. The Smiling Fire reappeared and stood before Jigme. He seemed to glow in his red-tinged darkness, as if with fullness and happiness.

  “You have done well,” the Smiling Fire said. “He was one who long ago defied me, and the time for my revenge had come.”

  The smile became bigger. The temple seemed hotter. “Much of my old strength has been returned. Yet now I understand.”

  “What do you mean? Why did you have to kill him?”

  The Smiling Fire walked away from Jigme. “Because he stole the fire from me. Yet as if in recompense, I see so much more now. I see so far. He has given me new eyes. Others stole too, as he did, but most of them are dead. Their fires are amongst the world and will be easy enough to recover.”

  Tears sprang into Jigme’s eyes, but he didn’t understand why. “I thought you sent him away.”

  “Oh, you mean the child?”

  Jigme nodded but he would not let his memory return to that day, so recent and so raw.

  “I’ve done as I said,” The Smiling Fire told him. “The child has gone to the better place I described.”

  “To the school?”

  “Yes. The school. Far north from here. Near the mountains,” the Smiling Fire said, his words halting and full of pauses. Sometimes Jigme felt like a finger was poking at images in his mind. “He is still on his way. But he will… He will send you… letters. I can feel his excitement, even now.”

  Jigme’s fears faded in the lull of the words. The child who had followed, now had gone on. It was okay. The old man was different. He stole. He had to be punished. Shouldn’t there be punishment for those who stole so much? It had to be right. But so much had happened.

  Weariness fell over Jigme.

  “May I rest now?”

  The Smiling Fire raised a hand. “There is no time for rest. There is only getting stronger or getting weaker. If you rest, I will fade. If I fade…”

  Jigme nodded, ignoring the tiredness that had fallen over his body. “What must I do?”

  With a wave of the Smiling Fire’s hand, images passed into Jigme’s mind, along with that feeling again of something poking at his thoughts. He saw children, smiling and running, eyes large and bright, blazing with the fire of life.

  The smile widened. “That is what I understand now. The children, Jigme. The children are everything. Bring them. As many as you can. The ones like you. Alone. Desperate. Hungry. I will… I will help them all.”

  “Just like the first child?” The child’s name tried to sound in his mind, but Jigme made it go away.

  “Yes. When the time is right, it will be your turn too.”

  “To go away to the school?”

  “With the other children.”

  “But Amma…”

  “She will be… proud… of you,” the Smiling Fire said. “She can go there too. You can learn again. You will have fields and hills to run around in. Green. Full of life. Isn’t that what you want?

  Jigme saw it too, as clear and vibrant as if it were a memory and not a dream. Cold streams ran over grassy hills. In the distance rose the peaks of the Himalayas. One mountain stood above all others. He ran and ran and ran, through the crisp morning air, ran with the other children, all smiles and fast breaths. When he returned, there was Amma, cups of hot chai waiting, and tales of each other’s day…

  “It does not have to be a dream, Jigme,” the Smiling Fire said. “It can be your life. But only if I am strong again.”

  It can be my life…

  The words and images resounded through Jigme’s mind as he ran through the crowds in the dusty, hot street, the sun high. He’d run to a farther s
ide of the city, far from the alley, far from the streets he usually roamed.

  Starting farther away would make it easier, the Smiling Fire had explained.

  The cries from the people at the market stalls rang around his ears. Where there were market stalls, there would be people with money buying. There would be people without money seeking, and many of them would be children.

  Money, Jigme thought, patting his pocket. The unusual weight there was the weight of endless possibilities, and all because of the Smiling Fire, the riches he’d given Jigme before returning the boy to the outside world. Jigme went up to a stall, haggled over the price of sweets and finally gave over some of the coins in his pocket.

  The hardest part, he knew, would be to find the lone child, the child who had no one to miss him.

  Many of the children had their own groups, all tied to an adult who took what they received from begging or theft. There would be no way to lure one of those children to the temple. But a child alone…

  Even here, some suspected who Jigme was. Many of the children stayed away. When they saw him, wariness flickered in their eyes.

  But there would be one. There was always one.

  The little girl stood against a wall and stared with hungry eyes. Grime covered her face. Her brown dress was torn in spots, frayed in others. Flies buzzed around the muck that covered her feet.

  She can’t be older than eight, Jigme thought, walking toward her, making sure she’d seen him before he opened the bag of gulab jamun and popped one of the sticky fried balls into his mouth. The sweetness of the milk, cardamom, and butter rang through him so intensely it almost stung.

  Jigme turned and put his back to the wall, standing next to her and chewing. Waiting.

  The little girl’s gaze stuck to him. When at last she looked from his face to the bag, he smiled and held out the bag to her.

  Tentatively, she raised her hand then backed away. Jigme stood still, smiling gently. He looked from her face to the bag. “Go on,” he said. “I know what it is to be hungry too.”

  She plucked two pieces of gulab jamun from the bag and stepped away, as if afraid he would change his mind and snatch them back. She shoved both pieces into her mouth, eyes widening as the flavors hit.