August

June 8

William Mackenzie sat silently in his seat by the window, in his study at the house in Dothan. The big chair held him, enveloped him with its smooth leather and its sturdy weight. The day he had bought it he had been so impressed with its weight. How could a single man, he had wondered, make something so elegant out of so much hard, intractable wood? How had human hands carved so deeply into the furrows and whirls of timber as to produce so fine an instrument? Will ran his hands over the leather of the chair. Once an animal - which one, he'd have no idea - but one. One man, one tree, one animal. All solitary, all bonded together in creation, in death. The carpenter whose hands had made this was certainly long dead by now. This chair was a relic, and that was another thing that Will had loved about it. Out of all the things that had not survived - families, nations, lineages, homes, wildlife, water - out of all these things, this chair had come through intact. Whether that was luck or Providence, Will had never decided. But it had come through. That was all that mattered.

Sitting in the chair now, he felt strange. It was his, still, and it comforted him, but there was also something else there. Some imprint of another humanity - one who had come and gone and who had been taken away at his hand. Eugene Step had sat here. He had sat here to tell his story, and to cry, and to ask the forgiveness of the council because he would not have done it had it been his to say, but he'd had no choice, no choice. The gods had told him, he kept saying. The gods had said Joshua was his.

The council had been swift in deciding. Death to Step, death to Saul Jefferson. Anyone who violated the covenants was a threat to the secrets of Dothan. And the secrets could not yet be known.

Will Mackenzie had been given this post by the man who had brought him in to Dothan. The Keeper, he had been named, and now Will was called that, too. The Keeper of what? Will knew. Of secrets. Of peace. Of answers and deaths and promises and lies. The keeper of all things no other man of Dothan would want. The Keeper of Life.

Getting up from the chair, he felt his back still ache from where he had held the shovel at an angle to the ground. So many shovelfuls it had taken to dig a hole, a shallow grave, and then to cover it. So many jabs into unyielding earth. Six feet would have been impossible. One and a half would suffice their needs.

Across the room, he filled his glass at the bar and returned to his chair, to musing. Outside of the locked library door, he heard foosteps running - Matty, probably, his youngest son, chasing his brothers. Devin always caught him - Normand never did.


John Dothan had claimed to be the genesis. He had claimed to know the code, the secret, the unique combination of genetic sequence and environmental exposure that was sure to turn any man into a Giver of Life. He had claimed to know the origin of the carrier condition.

But many men had said the same. And now Dothan's secret - and his refusal to allow the knowledge of the Answer to fall under another's power - had turned Will Mackenzie into a Keeper of Life. A man whose hands decided who would live and who would die. Will took another swallow of whiskey. Eugene Step was a good man. He had been a good man. A good man who had done very bad things, but hadn't they all? Let he without sin, Will had tried to tell the Council, but they would hear none of it.

Two had been killed. A debt would have to be paid. Life for a life. Two blood sacrifices. Two threats to the order removed. Two shallow graves on the sides of the road.

~:~

Phidias let himself into his bedroom, carrying a few books from the library and a glass of iced lemon tea. Henrik had disappeared early that morning to the lab. Mahir was tending to Ghali. Anders had gone into town with some of the staff. Caddy, who ordinarily would have been right under his father's feet, had taken up the new hobby of sulking in his room.

All of this meant that Phidias was blessedly alone, for the first time since he'd been at Wafra, and he planned to make the most of it.

Choosing a settee in the corner, he settled his books onto a side table with his lemon tea. The tea was bitter, but it settled his stomach, and the doctor had assured him it was safe to drink in small quantities; the test two days before had confirmed his and Henrik's suspicions.

Mahir had expressed open delight at the news, as had Tyson and, of course, Henrik. Neither Cadmus nor Anders had been informed yet.


From the top of the stack, Phidias lifted his small, clothbound journal. Having learned decades before that writing soothed him, Phidias had kept up a constant dialogue with his notebooks. Thinking things out seemed a hundred times easier when he could see the facts laid out before him, in charts and tables and sometimes little diagrams. He wrote notes to himself frequently: Marry Emily, one particularly famous note had gone, Yes -- No: Pros/Cons.
Emily had found it on their one year anniversary and demanded he read the list aloud. He'd been more nervous then than when he'd made it, but she had smiled so warmly that he had surrendered. By the time he finished the "pros" list, she was crying, and Phidias' heart had never felt more full of loving her.

He recalled now a similar list before marrying Henrik. A list of demands and sacrifices, skirmishes and allegiances. The effect had not been the same.


~:~

The house had been strange all week, and Aaron Soyinka, sitting at his desk in the office of his home, had no idea why. For months now, he'd been having strange feelings - whispers, he would almost call them - of something. As if there were shadows fleeting from the room each time he entered. At first, he had dismissed them. A lot had changed in his life recently, and any one of those things could have contributed to feelings of isolation, paranoia, fear. He had a new wife, for one. A new wife who his father had yet to meet. A new wife whom he had taken through perhaps not the best set of circumstances. Aaron found it difficult to forgive himself for that. But what had the alternative been? Death? Death would have been a mercy for Sheridan. No, the world was cruel, and it would have been Rowe House for the pretty carrier who Aaron had, upon first seeing, decided he could not abandon. Not to a fate like that - another body in the chop shop, another screaming, living corpse strapped to a chair.

Aaron firmly steered his mind away from that thought. Sheridan was fine now. He was fine, and in Aaron's good custody and safe from danger. At least, mostly. All week, his wife had skulked around as if haunted by something. Aaron could not determine what.


Aaron felt a brief flicker of faithlessness - perhaps it was the old man's juju making Sheridan sick. The thought passed quickly into resentment - he was beginning to sound like his father now, the paranoid old Englishman. That was exactly what his father would have said: Juju was bad. It messed with the natural order of things. Try prayer instead.

Sheridan still wore the band around his waist, and would not take it off; what the juju man had said had frightened him. What was it again? Aaron wondered. Bad spirits, or something. Juju men were always going on about bad spirits. The band was supposed to - keep them away?
Aaron scoffed and took his feet down from the desk.
Perhaps the band had just drawn them nearer. Something was haunting Sheridan.

He would have to speak with Harley.

~:~