Rexrider (First World's End Book 1) Read online

  As the hazy indigo dawn began to yellow, Melok watched through the washroom window as most of the pride mulled in the distance, but then he groaned. His mount, Gar-rex, was taunting the prime bull, Rayak-rex, yet again. The rexrider wondered how much longer Rayak would tolerate such behavior from his oldest resident male offspring. Melok sensed a challenge for Primacy was not far off. Thankfully, the rexriders had decided to take the pride to hunt this turn, and would be setting out soon. If he could just keep Gar-rex in check until the pride killed again, it could stave off challenges for some time.

  Melok hurried to eat something before the skywatchers’ bells sounded full dawn and the Sun Fast began. By the time he was finished eating, the blazing orb had breached the eastern horizon, striking the rocky exterior of the East Barrier with its bright rays. Melok turned his eyes away from the sight and went to his son’s sleeproom intending to pack some of the young man’s gear for the upcoming hunt. He was shocked to see Tamik still buried under his sleepskins. The young man was usually at Guardians’ Gulch for dawn training by now and he was especially expected this dawn.

  Melok stepped into the room and bent over the sleeper. He had planned, this turn, to see that his son remembered he was a rexrider. But his plan depended on Tamik getting to Lodge before the sun rose. Now he would have to improvise.

  “Wake.” He jostled the young man’s shoulder.

  “Leave me alone,” Tamik groaned, rolling over. “I had a trying tour at the inner gate last dusk. I have a right to sleep ‘til dawn. And did you have to come in bellowing like a sloggerbeast in must?”

  “Wake!” Melok said more forcefully as he opened the shutters. Bright light beamed in on Tamik’s downy face as the young man poked his head out from under the covers. A distant peal of sound from the skywatchers’ tower formally rang in the morrow. “Dawn is done and you should be at Lodge by now.”

  Tamik bolted up. “Why didn’t you wake me sooner?” he said, as if it were his father’s fault he was late. He squinted as he scowled at Melok’s craggy face, which was framed by the full beard of a Primary Rexrider.

  Melok ignored his son’s comment, saying, “You’ve missed your chance to eat. And it’s been nearly a full moon-pass since the rexes last hunted. The tradition requiring us Rexians to sun-fast during these 54 turns can’t prevent the rexes from food when they hunger.”

  Tamik kicked his feet off the bed onto the floor and yawned, still squinting at his father. “I’m late. I’ve got to get to the Lodge.” He spoke as if he were announcing an original thought.

  Melok glared at his son. “I’ve let you put your guardian training ahead of your duty to Gar quite long enough. Get ready to hunt. You can catch up on your sleep while in the saddle.”

  “I can’t go hunting,” Tamik insisted as he struggled out of bed wrapped in his top-sheet, his face aglow in the marauding sunshine. “I have responsibilities at the Lodge. The Guardians’ Games start on the morrow and I’m scheduled to compete. Plus I’m expected to help Sortan with some initiation rite this morrow.” He said the last words with marked pride and pushed past his father on his way to the washroom.

  “The games can do without you. And you’ve probably missed your ritual with Sortan,” Melok continued. “Your sense of duty to the guardians must be fading if you think you can miss an important appointment at the Lodge, so it’s time for you to renew your sense of duty to the rexriders.”

  Melok aimed a finger at his son afraid his plan with the guardians had failed, and he would have to resort to another tactic. “Besides, it is the rexriders’ responsibility to prevent trouble among the rexes and see that they hunt regularly. First, you are a rexrider. That’s a lot more vital than serving gate duty, and the rexes don’t care that you were up late or how hard a tour you had. Now dress for riding. The rexes need to hunt, or soon they’ll be eating the livestock and maybe even a passerby or two. That certainly won’t reflect well upon your guardian’s obligation to keep all Rexians safe.”

  Tamik’s slammed the washroom door before his father finished talking. Melok continued to speak through it to him. “If Gar kills someone in the paddock because it’s been too long since he hunted, I will hold you personally responsible.”

  “I hate hunting,” Tamik mumbled. He examined his reflection in a polished glass hanging on the wall, muttering curses while pinching a blemish on his oval face. “Why do you suddenly need my help to hunt? You getting too old?” he said half to himself

  “What did you say?”

  Tamik’s glower in the reflecting glass slackened into an expression of uncertainty. Against his will, his father’s manner was making him feel guilty. “Coming,” he managed to call out, but his mouth felt like it was full of spider webs.

  Tamik hung the top-sheet on a peg by the washroom door, and then stepped under the wash bucket. When he pulled the cord, cool water splashed over him.

  “Snake piss!” he yelled. “Why can’t we get steam-heat in here, or move, or something?”

  “You should be glad we have swamp gas for light and cooking,” his father shouted back from his bed chamber. “Besides, the cold water is good for you. Now quit wagging your tongue and move your feet!”

  Tamik found a lump on his scalp as he cleaned his shoulder-length dark hair, and he scrubbed his sore muscles with a sponge gourd. The fight must have taken more out of him than he had noticed at the time. After vigorously shaking the excess water off himself, he used his top-sheet to finish drying.

  Then he dragged a bone comb through his thick locks. They behaved tolerably enough, but his soft, short whiskers required more strident measures. He took out the groomer’s blade and scraped until he was content with the look and feel of his smooth, pointed chin. He liked to keep his lean face clean shaven. Besides, beards were a distinction only Primary Rexriders were encouraged to display. And he preferred the smooth cheeks of a guardian.

  As familiar sounds greeted him through the small washroom window, one in particular captured his attention: the roar of his father’s mount, Gar-rex. The beast’s agitated tone seemed to confirm his father’s assertions that the Stonehaven Pride was overdue for a hunt. Tamik understood that Gar was at a rebellious age, often testing the patience of the pride’s Prime Bull. It was contentious enough behavior on its own; empty bellies would make it even more troublesome.

  “You done yet?” Melok banged on the door. “Gar doesn’t care how you look!”

  “I’m coming!” Tamik shouted. Clanking the grooming blade into the wash basin, he yanked open the washroom door and stomped back into his room where his father had set out his riding clothes as if he were still a boy. He grabbed a clean body-length undergarment and climbed into it, buttoning it halfway up his chest. Then he pulled on his leather underboots and secured his thick riding chaps around his waist with a crox-skin belt to which a sheathed boning knife was attached. Finally, he squeezed into a faded red tunic. He pulled it down around his waist, and worked the slit in its side so that the hilt of the knife on his right hip stuck cleanly through.

  “Too stinking tight!” he grumbled, and peeled the over-garment off, tossing it on the floor and replacing it with one of his newer green guardian’s tunics from the trunk at the foot of his bed. After donning the saffron colored sash that displayed his status as a Secondary Rexrider, he slung his sword over his shoulder, grabbed the bulging tote his father had packed, and walked out of the room.

  His father had set a gas flame to a kettle on the stove rack, and it began to howl just as Tamik entered the cookroom. Melok scrutinized his well-built, sun-bronzed son. Despite their bickering, he was proud of him, although the youth’s hair seemed far too long—and that tunic!

  Tamik went to the cold storage and cut himself a chunk of cured meat. He returned with it to the table and sliced a mouthful off with his hip knife.

  “It’s too late to eat solid food,” Melok said with little conviction.

  Tamik ripped off a mouthful of smoky flesh with his teeth. “You can fast for the su
n’s sake all you want, but I’m not letting the skywatchers and their myths dictate when I eat. If it makes you feel better, I’ll keep the shutters drawn so the sun can’t see.”

  “You’re not going hunting dressed like that.”

  “That old rider’s tunic is too small. I outgrew it a long time ago.” Tamik stuffed some greens into his mouth.

  “Get one of mine, then.”

  “Yours are all too big, especially here.” Tamik tapped his own firm belly.

  Melok added boiling water from the kettle to a pot of ground botes beans and left it to steep. Some Rexians flavored the stimulant with royal jelly from the apiary, but Melok preferred the drink bitter.

  “You’re not going out with the rexriders dressed like a guardian,” he said, pouring the steaming botes through a metal filter into his mug. “Either wear your own tunic or pick one of my spares. If yours doesn’t fit, it’s because it's been so long since you’ve deigned to look like a rexrider. When we get back, if the hunt is a success, you can commission a new outfit.”

  “Maybe I should go next time, then, after I get a new uniform,” Tamik said, still chewing defiantly.

  Melok scowled, his efforts to ignore his son’s insolence failing. “You will go this time! And I don’t want to hear another word about it.” He took an impulsive gulp from his mug. It promptly burned his mouth, so he spit the liquid onto the floor, cursing and slamming his heavy stoneware mug down on the thick wooden table. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve and sipped some cold water from the tap. It gave him time to regain his composure.

  Tamik did his best not to laugh.

  “We need to keep Gar away from Rayak,” Melok said in a voice meant to convey even-tempered urgency. “It’s not a good time for a Primacy challenge.”

  He lifted Gar’s girth-strap assembly and hackamore off a wall-hook near the door. “I have to get supplies for the trip. Harness Gar. I’ll meet you in the paddock. And don’t be too long!” He tossed the riding gear on the table in front of Tamik.

  “Can I at least advise Sortan that I'll be going away? You just scolded me for shirking my guardian duties. I can’t disappear without explanation!”

  Melok paused as if to think about it, and then nodded in the affirmative. He had his own reasons for wanting Tamik to visit the Lodge this dawn. “Go tell Sortan, but waste no time getting back to the paddock.”

  Tamik nodded curtly, noting the nasty scar on his father’s right cheek. It seemed more pronounced than usual. The older rexrider pulled on his jerkin, slung his pack over his shoulder and took his set of swords off a rack near where the riding gear had hung. He left without further discussion. The scar reminded Tamik why he preferred his guardian’s duties to riding rexes. His father had been thrown off mount and into a briar of thorny kotz when Gar-rex was in early training, and that was one of Melok’s less debilitating wounds.

  Tamik added some honey to his father’s hot drink before finishing the mugful and headed to the older man’s room. From a trunk, he pulled out a red tunic, embroidered in gold thread with the profile of a rex, and slipped the garment over his head. He re-draped his Secondary Rexrider’s sash over his shoulder as he left the room. On his way out of the dwelling, he threw a riding cape over his arm and shouldered his jerkin and the gear his father had tossed on the table, finally pulling the door shut behind him.

  Tamik paused for a moment on his veranda in the shadows behind the barrier. The shady chill was refreshing. And though only nine turns had passed since Low Solstice, the light period of the turn was, indeed, winning back time.

  He glanced up Main Axis, the widest canyon in the citadel and the one that led to the main gate of the East Barrier. This was the hub of the Stonehaven Protectorate, the capital of the Western Kith. Several people were conducting business. A cobbler had set up his shop, located in a spot under the rexriders’ dwellings built into the lower level of the barrier. And across the street, a couple of meal carts that had been serving predawn eats and drinks were already closing their flaps until the dusk break-fast. Tamik could see his father in the distance to his left, entering the shop of a hardware vendor.

  Tamik skipped down the steps and turned right, moving briskly toward a nearby fruit stand, his riding spurs clinking on the cobblestone street, a sound he had almost forgotten how much he liked. He selected a bunch of grapes from the outside a produce stand before the vendor had a chance to closed up shop for the light season, and flipped the attendant a chip of copper. The man knew him well, and gave him a look of disapproval—it must have been obvious the rexrider was not purchasing the fruit to eat after dusk—but he took the cubeage anyway.

  Tamik clinked on toward the city gate in front of a group of flockkeepers that were heading out to gather eggs. He waved up at a fellow guardian serving the dawn tour, and then pushed through the pedestrian doorway, exiting into the inner paddock. The door slammed shut behind him.

  He was about to eat his grapes when his eye caught an old man sitting on a long stone bench near the gate. His hair was as white and wild as a fairyweed blossom, sprouting like tree moss from his head and face. Even his eyebrows were long and bushy. The old man was dressed in a faded blue skywatcher’s tunic that had been patched and repaired several times. It was tied at the waist with a hemp belt.

  Tamik knew him as the Seer who often told fortunes by the gates of the citadel for a chip or two of legal tender. He was the only person Tamik had ever seen dressed like a skywatcher for whom he felt sympathy. He wondered why the skywatchers let the old man wear that outfit. They were usually pretty particular about that sort of thing.

  The young rexrider looked at the man’s sunken eyes, and then at his own hand full of grapes and offered the fresh fruit to the Seer. The old man nodded his appreciation and carefully folded them into his frock to enjoy later, most likely after the sun set.

  Tamik then continued east along the cobbled stone road that hugged the northern cliffs heading toward the forked box canyon of the Guardians’ Gulch. To his right, the Kemek River meandered through the valley habitat, snaking around intricate natural stone formations which had been sculpted by the elements over countless millennia. Due to the recent dry spell, the river was running at a fraction of its wet season flow, and barely adequate to keep clean the ponds, pools and depressions along its route, especially after so much water was diverted to irrigate pastures, orchards and fields.

  Above, the north and south cliffs of the Kazak Valley bordered vast plateaus covered by thick deciduous forests. And the canyons, gorges and ravines were punctuated with flat-topped mesas and high buttes. Natural monoliths of multicolored limestone and marble stood tall, sentinels under a cloudy sky that looked as though a pail of white skaw curds had been dumped into a vat of blue, and then inverted by the hand of Mystery. Faced with this stunning array of natural arches, fins and spires, Tamik supposed he did live in a beautiful place, though he rarely gave it much though.

  Stonehaven’s pinnacles, fluted columns, and towers stood over the valley region like guardians on permanent watch. Some had been modified by Rexian stone crafters and builders to be more refined or useful. Some of the formations with their abutments and bridges functioned as living and working spaces. The craftsmanship was of such a refined and detailed nature that it often took several sars to make a noteworthy addition to the protectorate. Glazed fenestrations in the rock signaled openings in multi-level dwellings that had been hewn meticulously out of solid stone. The patches of glass now reflected the sun like jewels buried in the cliff’s face.

  Thousands of cook fires had been kindled for the pre-dawn meal. Their rivers of smoke arose from a multitude of blackened chimney cracks and formed a hazy lake that hung in the sky, producing a grey halo around Whitepeak, the tallest and most outstanding feature of the entire vista. It sprung from behind the Skywatchers Plateau, a place that produced no warmth in Tamik’s heart.

  Some distance away, the local pride of prairie rexes congregated on the East Knoll. A handful of rexriders a
nd attendants were already among the beasts prodding them toward the perimeter wall. Melok’s mount, Gar, was still harassing Rayak.

  Tamik picked up his pace. After passing the Smugglers’ Compound, he saw the wall that divided the grounds of Guardians’ Gulch from the inner paddock. Thick, green vines clung to the cracks in the mortar and blossomed with purple flowers. A rambling brook flowed through an arched portico in the wall and angled left, continuing perpendicular to the path on which Tamik now walked. He crossed the small stone bridge that rose over the brook and headed toward the Gulch's large, circular gate.

  Embrace the Gift

  When Mystery calls your name,

  Or resist that ecstasy of death,

  And suffer your return to the Beyond.

  --Kalikanuma

  2. Gift

  The wilderness between the Central and Western Kiths dawn, 9/01/1643—

  Thump! Thump! Thump! Eko loped along, instinctively wary of the wilderness through which he now passed. His taloned feet beat the dusty earth as his powerful hind legs propelled him onward. His smaller front paws maintained a steady cadence, slapping against his belly, and his long, sinewy tail extended behind him as he bore his rider, Vintar, along the principal trade route between their own Western Kith and the Central and Northern Kiths of the Civilization of Rex.

  Vintar perched prostrate and eyes forward astride her sturdy mount. She peeked over scallop-shaped ears, and between short horns that encircled his dome shaped head. Vintar was dressed in leg chaps over snug-fitting hip boots, both worn to a supple texture, and a soft, beige tunic that caressed her torso under a tough, new leather jerkin laced up the front and draped with a gold trimmed, saffron sash of honor.

  A heavy dew might have generated a colorful flush of fresh dawnflower blossoms on the desolate rolling prairie, but even that had not occurred in quite some time. Conditions in the interior of the Snail Continent were dry except for a few verdant strips along the rivers and ravines. Regardless of the weather, transporting important missives, promissory notes and legal tender between the Northern, the Central, and the Western Kiths was the present commission of this Senior Smuggler.