Westhaven by Rowan Erlking (best sci fi novels of all time TXT) 📕

“No. But they know how to cut through it. Their strategy is better than ours. They are better coordinated and more organized. And yes, they have figured out a way to stop our magic, whether it is by magician, witch, or wizard. What we need to do is better organize ourselves. Plan a way to get their technology and use it against them.”

“Is this why the general is so scared of you?” Edman stood up, finished with tying off Key’s bandages. “He’s afraid you’ll steal his magic?”

“No,” Key snapped, looking the witch in the eye so that he would not be misunderstood. “Technology.”

“But can you do it?” Callen asked.

Blinking, Key nodded. “Some of us already have. When I was in the Southwest Corner years ago, a lone gunman—human—came into the village where the general and I had come. I think it was Kitterleen Village. He used a pair of pistols to attack the Sky Children. And as far as I know, they never found him.”

Callen nodded, stroking his beard. “I’ve heard of him.”

The swordsman looked up, surprised.

“Do you remember all of the villages in the Southwest Corner that you’ve been to?” the woman asked Key.

Looking up at her, Key nodded. “Every one. Especially the ones the general burned.”

“Young man,” she said with a deep pleased hum in her voice. “You have a remarkably unusual memory. What else do you know?”

Scratching his head, Key then searched for his bandana, realizing that he really didn’t want his patchy hair stared at in case someone got the wrong idea and decided to claim the reward of six thousand in silver. “I don’t know. I can read. Make swords, uh, arrowheads….”

“No.” She chuckled. “What I mean is, what else about the blue-eyes’ advantage do you know?”

Nodding, he continued to search for his bandana. Key found it on the ground two yards away. Picking it up, he shook the dust out. “They can communicate over long distances with the telegram. They have vehicles that fly in the sky from city to city.”

“That’s how General Gole got to the Herra Hills,” Frad said, nodding.

“But I also know they have a bunch of demons hunting them,” Key said.

“Cordrils,” the other man from the Herra Hills confirmed.

The three men glanced at one another with a dark look as if that news didn’t make much of a difference.

“And,” Key looked to the woman with a nod. “Their generation is failing. More brown-eyeds are being born, and they don’t have the gift of touch absorption.”

Edman blinked. “They don’t have it?”

Key shook his head. “No. General Winstrong never had it. But he doesn’t need it. He uses his mind to kill. He’s a strategist. And that is exactly what we need. A strategy.”

“A strategy,” murmured the swordsman as if it were a novel idea.

“We need an army,” Key said, nodding.

Edman stood back and laughed. “And who is going to organize this army? You?”

Suddenly flushing red, realizing that he was nothing more than a boy talking to experienced warriors and magic wielders, Key looked to the ground.

“I’ll stand by him,” Tiler said, putting his arm around Key.

Key winced, the pain in his shoulder still acute.

“So will I,” Frad said nodding to his fellows from Herra. “Since Key came to our camp we have had more success in our raids than we ever had.”

“Including that dramatic city burning?” the woman asked with a raise of her eyebrows.

“Hey! That was not Key’s doing,” Tiler said, snapping at her.

“He is the reason so many of our people escaped unharmed from camp,” the other man from Herra said. “And by the way, I got word from our leader that he and the witch will be coming here to visit with you, Key. They’re bringing the maps.”

Frad nodded.

The boys all sighed with relief.

“So, are we gathering again?” Frad asked his partner.

The man nodded. “It appears that way.”

“Oh no.” The woman leader of that camp stepped between them. “If you are planning to make this your new headquarters, you have another thing coming. This is a refugee camp. Not a future battleground.”

“Everywhere is a future battleground,” Key said. He bent over to pick up his bloody shirt out of the dirt. Walking away, he murmured. “The Sky Children won’t let any of us alone.”

 

Chapter Sixteen: Fits of Anger

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mid-spring when the trees were flowering, the refugees of the Herra Hills raiders regrouped in the Duglis Mountains away from the refugee camp. But that did not mean the two camps did not continue to interact. The three travelers whom the boys later learned were mercenaries who occasionally worked with Lady Sadena (the regulator of the refugee camp and an admitted wizard) often spoke with Key when he wasn’t busy making swords. Most of their discussions were in private with the magician Vang Gerrit and the witch from the Herra Hills. The also included their current camp leader and Frad.

There were others who convened with this group. A porter who had been a Sky Child’s slave from his youth came with two other men from a northern camp they ran near the city of Mistrim. Often they talked in secret for hours.

“What do you think they are saying in there?” Rainold asked Tiler, peering at the cave the wizard had hollowed out for their meetings as a hideaway.

Tiler held his fist pressed to his mouth, glaring at the cave also. “Key will tell us if it isn’t a secret. They’re mostly using him because he can read.”

They watched the cave opening in silence, waiting for someone to exit. The first one was Key. And he looked tired. He grumpily tramped down the cut path in the rock. Tiler hopped up and ran over to him.

“So, what’s going on? What are they saying?”

Key stopped and looked at him. “If I were to tell you, the witch said he’d put a curse on me.

“Besides,” Key continued to walk down the mountain path to their camp which was now hidden in the fresh green of the new leaves and buds, “They don’t quite get it yet. I keep telling them that we need to teach everybody else to read first before we do anything.”

“To read?” Tilter halted where he was. “Isn’t that hard?”

Key shook his head as he continued down. “No. Not really. It just takes practice just like everything else.”

“But…” Tiler hurried after him, passing Rainold who joined them going down the mountain. “You can remember more things than the rest of us. That’s the only reason why you can read and we can’t.”

Halting, Key turned and shook his head. “No. The only reason I can read is because General Winstrong made me write and repeat the letters over and over again. And if I did it wrong, he’d punish me. Anybody would learn how to read after that. Trust me. It was survival.”

“So are you saying that you are going to teach us how to read and write?” Rainold asked, trotting after them.

Key blinked. He thought for a moment then slowly nodded. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Why not? If they don’t think it’s important, then I will take care of it myself.”

Tiler glanced at Rainold. He thought it was crazy, but Rainold suddenly looked excited.

The boys started down the hill again, watching Key nod to himself while planning what he had to do. When they reached the bottom, Key gathered together the boys and any other person who wanted to learn their letters and had them sit where there was loose dirt. Key grabbed a long stick then told them to get one for themselves as well. He stood in front of them and took a breath.

“Ok. This is our letters lesson. Today we learn their names. Tomorrow we will do more.” Key then drew the first letter in the dirt. “This is the letter Bet. It makes the sound b. Say and write Bet.”

They tried to copy him but Key had to correct several of them, slowly showing the strokes and repositioning their hands on their sticks.

“Bet,” he said, demonstrating again. “Remember. Bet curves here and this one is a line with only a slight curve. They touch here. Now write and say the letter with me. Bet.”

“Bet,” some of the group repeated.

“I mean all of you,” Key said, poking Polen. “You can’t learn it right if you don’t say it every time. Now, bet.”

More of them said it. Key whacked a kid on the head with his stick.

“I said all of you. Bet.”

More repeated though someone muttered that it was stupid.

“No, it is stupid not to read at all.” Key then smacked him on the head. “Say it and write it. This is how I learned my letters. It will work for you too. Bet.”

They all said, “Bet.”

“Bet.”

They repeated.

“Bet.”

They repeated.

“Bet.”

 

They went through all the twenty-one consonants of their language, repeating each one and writing each one until Key felt satisfied. Then he drilled them by writing a letter and having them call it out. Then he drilled them by calling out the letter and having them write it out. This took most of the afternoon. Then he informed them of the twelve vowels they would learn the following day, showing them the marks that went in between the consonants.

“These vowels,” he said, “are not always written in the script. Some people skip them, so you have to learn words rather than just sounding them out. I’ll write your names today so you can at least get used to reading them. When we learn all the print letters I’ll show the handwriting they use. Reading handwriting is harder because it goes from top to bottom rather than from left to right.”

“This is so hard,” moaned Berd.

“This is only the first day,” Key said, patting him on the head where he had whacked him earlier for not listening. “Things are always hard on the first day.”

“How long did it take you to learn to read?” a man in their group asked. Others stood around and waited to talk to Key, an opportunity they had actually been waiting for a while.

Thinking, Key scratched the side of his head. “It has been a while, uh…I think I got my letters down in a week, and I was able to read print well in a month. The sounds are exactly what you see, so that’s not hard. But it took me a little longer to really understand script.”

“Is that normal?” the man asked.

With a shrug, Key tossed up his hands. “I don’t know normal. General Winstrong taught me. I wasn’t part of a class. And I was scared to fail him so, it might be faster than normal. I don’t know.”

Tiler nodded.

“Ok. We’ll work on it as if a demon is after us. Right?” Tiler looked to the others. But except for Rainold who was still practicing his letters in the dirt. No one else seemed as enthusiastic. “We have to learn this. All the Sky Children can do it, and that means they have an advantage over us. Am I right, Key?”

Key nodded. “That’s exactly right. If we can all read, we will know that they are writing each other. We can intercept letters and, if we learn their code, we can intercept their telegrams.”

“And we can overthrow them,” the man from their class said, nodding.

“Exactly.” Key turned.