She cupped his face and kissed him back. “You know I will.”

“Do I?”

“Meoraq, if there had been a starship waiting there all fueled up and freshly-waxed just the way Scott wanted, I’d still be going home with you. Didn’t you know that by now?”

“Yes,” he said and nipped at her shoulder. “But I like to hear you say it.”

She stood up, hugging herself as she watched the sun sink over the mountains, setting the sky around it on fire. The first timekeepers began to ring the bells of tenth-hour and the rest quickly joined in. Kitchen smells began to ride the wisps of smoke leaking from the wind-ways. Somewhere on a neighboring section of the roof, music began to play: a celebration of life, a song of praise before God. “I really am sorry about your little knives,” Amber said.

“Eh, you saved me, didn’t you? Besides—” He patted her braid on his arm. “—I still have this to wear. And I have your cup.”

“And your tea box.”

“Then life is good. Help me.”

She took his arm and together they managed to get him on his feet. He took a moment to adjust to his weight and the way the world wanted to pull at it and then just looked at her.

“Life is good,” he said again, not without some weary surprise. “Isn’t it?”

She thought it over, her soft brow furrowed, frowning. “Yeah,” she said at last, and even huffed out a little laughter. “Yeah, I really think it is.”

He put out his hand. She took it and together, they left the roof. The sun slipped away, but the clouds kept burning, outlined in shocking shades of pink and blue. The clanging bells died and the music played on. The last hour of Gann ended, the hour of Uyane began, and in the east, the first star of evening came out.

THE END

September 2010 – September 2013

Also by R. LEE SMITH:

Heat

The Lords of Arcadia Series:

The Care and Feeding of Griffins

The Wizard in the Woods

The Roads of Taryn MacTavish

The Army of Mab

Olivia

The Scholomance

Cottonwood

COMING SOON

Pool

Coming in 2014!

Pool

PROLOGUE

The Kuluzo Mountains in eastern Alaska have always been a dangerous place, but the low buckle of rock the white men called Mount Isaac was more dangerous, not because of the ice which cloaked its more impressive brothers in the Kuluzos, or the quakes that rocked so many of the mountains in that land, but because it was also a bad place. The Naiaksit Indians who made their homes in the dry forests at its feet called it “Chuatok”—the Hunger—and told tales of the restless and angry spirits who roamed there, of Wendigo whose wild song could make a man desire to feed on the flesh of other men, of the monstrous sons of Trickster who knew no welcome in heaven or on Earth. The whites came in their quest for gold, penetrating the wild places by the thousands in a mere handspan of years. They left a grave behind at the end of every day, but still they came and it was said of them by more than one mouth that no place was so haunted that the white men would not try to cut a pass through it or set a town atop it…but no pass was ever made across relatively small Mount Isaac, where no Indian guide of any tribe would go and no white scout ever returned. Chuatok hungered. Chuatok fed.

Nevertheless, in 1897, gold was found in that same Alaskan wilderness where Wendigo howled, and from that day, the white man inevitably came. Towns grew up fast even in dangerous places, around Mount Isaac at first, and finally, tentatively, atop it. Men vanished, but then, in such places when keeping only the untamed company of other impoverished and desperate fools, men will. Their lives were unremarkable. Their deaths were quiet.

Until Hodel in the summer of 1898.

The Hodel Mining Company boasted a great profit in that largely luckless year of the Klondike Rush, but then, the Hodel Mining Company did not dig for gold. Oh, they took it where they found it, and they did find it now and then, but the company’s interest lay in other minerals—“Industry minerals,” as the mine’s founder was so oft to say, with great emphasis and satisfaction on the first word—and, of course, in acquiring its discouraged and impoverished labor force as cheaply as possible. In the eight months since the mine’s opening, great quantities of lead and zinc had been pulled from the deep rock and shipped away down the rough road on the three-week trek to the railroad, as well as a few modest tons of silver and several crates of cinnabar (Hodel always accompanied those shipments himself, eschewing the luxury compartments aboard the train which he usually favored to sit, smoking and glowering, atop the crate containing the valuable ‘red mercury’). There were no Naiaksit left by then to warn them not to dig, and it is doubtful anyone would have listened if there had been. It takes terrible things to make a desperate man take warning, and Alaska in 1898 was filled with desperate men.

It began slowly, a mere trickle before the flood. Lone-wolf miners who had for years come in as regular as the rains to trade a tobacco-pouch of gold dust for a bath, a bottle, a box of bullets and one of Handsome Jack’s two-penny whores did not come in. The flint-eyed strangers suspected by many of claim-jumping and murder, vanished next, but no great loss. Some of the men working the Hodel Company’s mine came up muttering to each other about noises they could not have heard down in the deepest shafts, described by some as “that clicking, ear-picking sound that bats make right up close”, or “a heavy, slithery sound, with claws”, or just, “breathing, real quiet, allus coming from behind-like”. Hodel did his best to put a stop to that noise, but when Miss Molly Slipper, highest-paid whore in camp at ten cents a throw, took herself out the door on a drunk and never came back, men started to leave. Only one or two at first, the soft-handed sort no one was particularly surprised to see the back end of in this wilderness, but then it was Calico Pike, working the deep end of the unfinished Shaft Six, who took his pick and a handcart down the Number Nine tunnel, let out a bellow, a curse and then a scream, and was gone by the time the other men in the morning crew took the necessary ten running steps to round the tunnel’s sharp turn. There was a new hole in the back wall where he’d been cutting, a cold breeze that blew out of it, three dollar-sized drops of blood just below it, and a sound receding into the black—that clicking, scraping, heavily-breathing, impossible sound.

A lot of men left then, and one of them was Handsome Jack Hodel, son and scion of Richard Hodel, founder of the Hodel Mining Company and owner of the Hodel Mine, the Hodel General Store, the Hodel Claim Registry, and the Hodel Traveller’s Rest (who proudly advertised beds, baths, and spirits, but not the women that brought in most of their trade). He left after listening to his father rant at his foremen for three and one-half hours about how there was nothing in those tunnels, nothing dragging burly miners away, and nothing for God’s sake eating them and gnawing on their mother-loving bones, so take these Christing things out right now and bury them before some superstitious damned fool sees them! He left, and he took as much as he could fit into a set of saddlebags with him, including $4700 in bills, $2200 in silver, all the cinnabar he could pocket, and the deed to Hodel itself, which was not really stealing, since he was his father’s only son, so far as anyone knew, and a man had an obligation to look after his inheritance.