That silence in the high valley was corporeal, heavy and complete, and was only broken by the whistle of wind through vitrified rock. On the lee-slope of a rust-colored mesa here the ash-storms which cleared the Crimson Wastes became a faint alkaline seeming dust on the morning air. This was the location that was not mentioned in any map that Ryder Graves had ever been aware of. He called it Solitude.
His house was a low-built one that was hollowed halfway into the bottom of the mesa, constructed of scrounged plasteel and rammed-earth. And the real refuge was yet a dozen paces distant; a geodesic dome of plundered glass panels, the surface of which was carefully cleaned to admit the weak, filtered sun. Inside was a miracle.
The greenhouse air was damp, and smelled so foreign to the Ash Frontier I was almost as though I were in another world: damp soil and green foliage. A few plants grew in raised beds in neat beds which challenged the deadness of the outside world. And in the middle, in his own pot, was the Aethelbloom.
Its petals were as impossible and pure white as the fresh snow in a storybook. It was his only one, a non-mutated, weak relic and had taken him three years to cajole out of one seed, salvaged. It had been Elara's favorite. Looking after it had been his penance, his contemplation, his rope to the man that he had been, before the world was on his hands, before he had burned so much of it.
Ryder passed through his morning routine as sniper-like. He monitored the salinity of hydroponic trays, turned the UV lamps to make up the acid-yellow sky, and wiped dust off the leaves of the Aethelbloom. What had been once hands of such destructive violence that Syndicate warlords cursed his name at the mention of his name was soft and steady. His nails were short, the trowel and the water can had caused the calluses on his palms, and not the hold of a revolver.
He might seem to have the infection in his veins, an idle smithy closed up by sheer force of the will. The Requiem Burn. It was whispering to him in his dreams, it was offering him clearthood, power, an end of the ever-present, aching soreness of memory. He denied it. The days he was there in this silent step were a triumph over the monster within.
His past was sleeping beneath a loose stone slab beneath his bunk. His twin revolvers, with the chambers emptied, were wrapped in an oilskin cloth and called, 'Seraphs Tears.' The tactical rig, the monoblade, the implements of a trade which he had vowed never to remember, were buried with them. On other days, the urge to just have them was physical pain, an addicts need to be with the one he once was. He never gave in.
When the twin suns were at the zenith, something was amiss, and he sensed it. It was not a sound but a change in the pressure. The usual talk of the mutated lizards of the canyon had died away. A drop of water, frozen at the edge of his can, hung on the lips of Ryder. His breathing, as though he did not know it, had slowed to almost imperceptible time. The civilized half of him subsided, and the ghost, the hunter, surfaced with no sound at all, in perfect coldness.
He didn't reach for a weapon. There were none to reach for. He just stood and listened to the whole body. then he heard: the stamp of foot on gravel, thoughtless and swaggering. Not one pair. Three.
They had come to the verge of his clearing and stood up of the heat haze like visions turned into reality. Ashborn. Their stances were swaggering, and their skins were blazed with the glowing jagged tattoos of the gay revelers in their mutation. The leader was a great hulking brute, who had one eye instead of the other, a blinking red photoelectric cell, which was scanned over the shack and then the greenhouse. His eyes hung on the burst of impossible white.
Well, see this, the voice of this brute was a gravelly distortion which was filtered through a vox-unit implanted in his throat. The Prophet said that the Saint Cinder was softened. He never claimed to have become a gardener.
Ryder said nothing. He was standing motionlessly in the doorway of the greenhouse, a figure on the bright green and white.
The leader went on to take a step forward and said, The Prophet Marek wishes you good day. "He extends an invitation. The last one."
When finally Ryder spoke, his voice was soft, and hoarse with inactivity, and completely free of terror. "I declined the others."
The argument is more persuasive in this one. The brute fumbled with his fingers and one of his henchmen pointed a short, ashen-scarred rifle at the greenhouse.
Time had slackened, to crystallise. Ryder perceived the finger squeeze on the trigger. He saw the trajectory. He could have moved. He might have, perhaps, reached the man, smashed his hands on him, before the shot was discharged. But he was ten paces away. And in between the rifle and the Aethelbloom was his body.
The gunfire was not very loud, but the glass smashing was a note of exquisite, personal violence. The round punched the dome, and one of the hydroponic trays in a shower of nutrient fluid and flaked plant material.
The world was not brought to a clash of fire. It culminated in that one short sharp breaking note.
The leader laughed, a nasty grating noise. Then the spot next to the fair bloom, Saint. Coming willingly?"
Ryder Graves gazed at the snickering savage out of the ravaged shrine of his greenhouse. Looking at the Aethelbloom, which was not yet spoilt, he was exposed to the poisonous air. He had caught Elara smiling, the manner in which it had wrinkled the sides of her eyes. Then he perceived no more, but a flat gray calm.
He made one step slowly out of the greenhouse door.
All right, he said, his voice no longer low, yet at this moment touched with something long, long slumbering.
The thugs of Ashborn smiled, believing that they had succeeded.
They were wrong. They had just woken the grave.