The Mansions of Idumea (Book 3 Forest at the Edge series) Read online

  “Comforting the citizenry,” was what his father cynically called it. The daily ride was insisted on by the Administrator of Culture who thought the world would feel comfort, in spite of the increased thievery, if they saw their fort commanders out among them.

  It was stupid, Perrin frequently thought, but mystifyingly it worked to make people feel secure, even though they weren’t.

  “Lieutenant Colonel!”

  Perrin heard the hopeful call of the owner of what he privately called the Useless Additional Collars and Cuffs Shoppe. The store sold little bits of fancy cloth to attach to clothing that already had enough on them. The place was actually called the Adornment Shoppe, and Perrin suspected the extra p and e at the end of shop was to represent the absurdity of the place.

  But, he dutifully put on his How May I Be of Genuine and Sincere Service smile—one that Mahrree made him practice until it was genuinely sincere—and nudged his horse over to the squat man and his towering wife. “And what can I do for you this fine Planting Season day?”

  “You can promise me,” began the woman with a terrifyingly hooked nose, “that none of those snotty teenagers will be raiding our Shoppe!”

  Perrin could even hear the extra p and e, along with the capital s. The woman’s husband bobbed his head happily but added a nod of apology.

  “We’ve been through this before, Mrs. Snobgrass; I can’t promise anything beyond my soldiers and myself working day and night to keep the entire village safe.” His smile stayed firmly in place the entire time, although he could feel it cracking around the edges. “You are, however, free to hire additional guards yourself. There are many former soldiers who hire out their services.”

  “Why would I want to do that?” Mrs. Snobgrass exclaimed, her crossed arms getting tighter. “It’s not my job to prevent theft!”

  Perrin shrugged casually. “It’s not my job to raise the teenagers of Edge better, either, but it seems we’re both stuck with the problem. And honestly,” he said with a tone dripping so much honey to coat his meaning, “I can’t imagine why anyone would want to bother your establishment.”

  Mr. Snobgrass puffed in pride, and Mrs. Snobgrass frowned, trying to figure out if she’d been insulted or not.

  Before she could, Perrin tipped his cap and continued on his survey of Edge. There’d be many more stops like this one, and he wanted to get them over with.

  Except there was a hog in his way, and it wasn’t a shop owner.

  The 250 pound beast grunted at Perrin, and to his horse’s credit, the mare snuffed back.

  “Walter!” a man cried. “Get back here!”

  Perrin never understood why people assumed food would comprehend what was yelled at it. But apparently Walter had some intelligence, because with a loud squeal the hog headed off into the village green.

  “Sorry, sir!” a man puffed as he stopped in front of Perrin. He gestured helplessly at his fleeing pork chops. “He sort of got away from me.”

  “Sort of?” Perrin asked, and noticed the man had come from the direction of the butcher’s.

  “What do you know about catching hogs, Commander?” the man asked.

  Perrin also never understood why people thought he knew everything. It wasn’t for the flattering reason that he had a Command School education, but likely because years ago the Administrators made all of the fort commanders their authorities in the villages. While Perrin never actually superseded the power of the magistrate or the chief of enforcement, still they and everyone else in Edge deferred to him. Occasionally it was useful; usually it was just irritating, assuming that Lieutenant Colonel Shin knew how to solve any problem.

  Then again—and Perrin knew he was arrogant to think it—he felt he did know more than anyone else, and rather preferred his opinion was asked instead of anyone else’s. If nothing else, he was more logical than most.

  “I know that you should probably remain in pursuit of your pig instead of chatting in the middle of a busy marketplace,” Perrin hinted.

  The man nodded and obediently took off again.

  There was something else Perrin could do for him. He glanced up at the village green tower, but already one of his soldiers was reading his mind and had his horn to his lips.

  Two short blasts. One longer blast. Two more short ones.

  The pattern signaled not an emergency of thieves or fire, but warned the citizens to keep an eye out for something unexpected. Such as a nervous hog barreling down on them.

  Perrin smiled in approval as the corporal saluted him. The horns had been a logical additional to the tall wooden towers. Three soldiers manned this one, the busiest of the twelve constructed throughout Edge to look for Guarders or any other trouble. Each tower had been originally outfitted with colored banners the soldiers hoisted as a signal to the fort that help was needed, or an official coach was on its way. But after a while Perrin realized villagers could use a bit of warning too. It didn’t take much to come up with some simple patterns soldiers could trumpet to neighborhoods to signal that a child was lost, someone required a doctor, or stray livestock needed to be corralled.

  No, what took much longer was to get Major Yordin in Mountseen to come up with it all.

  Perrin realized that if he kept coming up with innovations to improve the world, he’d also keep being promoted. While his parents thought it was now tradition that the High General of Idumea needed the last name of Shin, Perrin wasn’t one much for the tradition. So when General Shin sent out his son to all the forts in the world to bring them in line with his (a gesture that was met with a predictable amount of resistance and resentment), Perrin knew he needed to start scaling himself back.

  When he met Major Yordin at Mountseen, a loud but personable fort commander, Perrin knew he’d found the perfect conduit. It was during his explanation of how the towers could best be placed throughout the village that Perrin began to hint at ways to make the towers even more useful. It took the entire afternoon, but by dinner Yordin had jotted down a variety of patterns and meanings, and had even sketched a crude drawing of a serviceable horn, modified by Perrin.

  The next year when Major Yordin was named Officer of the Year for his contribution of the horn system, now adopted throughout the world, Perrin was more than happy to let him take all the credit.

  It meant that Perrin’s promotion to lieutenant colonel wouldn’t be immediate, which meant his promotion to full colonel would also be delayed, and so too would be becoming general.

  If Perrin stayed quiet enough, Idumea might forget about him altogether.

  After Perrin helped corral the hog with a few other villagers, and the grateful owner said he’d later send over a few pounds of bacon as thanks, Perrin rode through the most expensive part of Edge: the Edge of Idumea Estates, with its appending Edge of Idumea Hot Springs Villas and Cottages for Citizens Over 50, where the name was bigger than some of the houses, or rather, cottages. Hycymum and many of her sewing group friends had moved over to the Cottages, lured by the promise that they could paint their homes in one of four approved colors to match each other.

  The Cottages had their own private guards who were occasionally effective at catching the teenagers slipping into back doors while their owners were going out the front to catch the latest Idumea-imported entertainment at the amphitheater or the new arena. But more often than not it was Perrin and his men who nabbed the boys somewhere between their permanently borrowing baubles of gold and silver, and dropping them off somewhere down the slope that led to the marshes in the east.

  Shem was the one who figured that out, many years ago now, when he spied a boy leaving a fine leather jacket under an old basket, then saw a man in black slip out of the trees to retrieve it. It wasn’t until Shem chased the man through two farms, tackled him in a pig sty, then watched, horrified, as the man used a jagged blade to kill himself that they had evidence: the Guarders were using the impressionable youth of Edge to do their thieving for them.

  As Perrin peered hard into the concealing
shrubs around the expensive houses, he took little comfort in the fact that Edge wasn’t the only village afflicted with raiding teenagers; the same thing happened in every village on the outer edges of the World.

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  Perrin cringed at the shrill voice.

  “I know that’s you, Hycymum’s son-in-law! Over here!”

  And Perrin knew it was his mother-in-law’s neighbor, again. The woman was frequently outside in the late afternoon on sunny days, and he suspected she was watching for him. He turned around, with his smile firmly in place, and nodded politely to the elderly woman standing just ten paces away from him but shouting as if he were one hundred. “Mrs. Reed. How are you, today?”

  “Fine!” she bellowed back, oblivious to the fact that not everyone was as hard as hearing as she thought they were. “Just got back from my daughter’s! I’m two days early, but she said I needed to get home to . . .” She squinted in thought. “I don’t remember why she thought I should come home early.”

  Perrin’s smile turned painful. He could think of a few reasons. “Well, then—glad you were able to return safely from Moorland. I really need to be—”

  “Did you see the house?” she shouted eagerly at him. “Going up just over there in the Estates? Much larger than our little Cottages here, and Hycymum was saying just a few weeks ago that you were thinking of moving—”

  “She’s trying to move us, Mrs. Reed,” Perrin said loudly, annunciating every word to, once and for all, put an end to this move-into-something-bigger-and-richer nonsense that his mother-in-law had recruited help with. “But we’re not coming down here, understand?”

  She pointed a wrinkled little finger at him. “But your mother and father were here last year, and I remember them—”

  “—touring the Estates and trying to find something they could coerce us into, yes, yes, yes, I remember. And no, no, no Mrs. Reed—we’re not moving. Now, I really must go—”

  “Shall I find Hycymum for you?” she bellowed. “Wait, she’s cooking at Edge’s Inn today, right? I need to cook too,” she said, a hazy gloss coming over her eyes. “Your Shem Zenos will be wanting cookies again . . .”

  Perrin’s brow furrowed in worry. Mrs. Reed often flowed in and out of clarity, and the thought of her starting a fire made him nervous. Usually her friends looked after her, but he had passed Hycymum’s Herd—her group of a dozen biddies—oohing and aahing at new hats in a window. They wouldn’t be back for some time to notice that their neighbor had come home early.

  “Mrs. Reed, I think you should go in now and have a nice lie-down. I’m sure your friends will bring you by some cookies when they come back.”

  “Good idea, Lieutenant Corporal!” she called cheerfully. “I missed my pillow. We have such good chats.”

  Perrin tipped his cap and made sure she shut the door tightly behind her before he whirled his horse again.

  Little surprise she thought Shem would be by for cookies, although lately he’d been bringing them to her. Shem was every widow’s claimed son. He spent his days off at The Cottages fixing their cabinets, building them shelves, and listening to the same stories again and again. Little wonder he couldn’t find an eligible woman to marry under age sixty: he had his own harem of the hard-of-hearing.

  Perrin spurred his horse into a trot out of The Cottages and into the grander Estates. As he passed the enormous houses his parents and Hycymum wanted them to buy with all the gold and silver hidden in their cellar, and a sneer formed on his mouth. He nodded to one of the guards, a former sergeant of his who sat in a little shack with his feet up and his sword down. Small surprise that they rarely saw anything out of their tiny windows. Throwing dices was always more entertaining, as if practicing by himself would finally help him win more slips of silver from his friends.

  Perrin saw only one person in the Estates at that hour, and even a lurking teenager would have been a more welcome sight than Mrs. Hili, Qualipoe’s mother.

  She was walking up to her broad front stairs, her arms loaded with colored boxes tied in frivolous ribbons, likely packages from the Adornment Shoppe. She turned quickly when she heard the horse trotting on the cobblestones, but her enormous jiggling girth stiffened as she eyed the commander of the fort.

  He eyed her right back, matching her glare for glare. That had been their customary greeting for the past eight years. Mrs. Hili didn’t even try to hide her disdain for him, as if somehow it was Perrin’s fault that he first caught Poe Hili stealing silver and sweetbread, crumbs of it still on his chin, and trying to escape clumsily from a neighbor’s back window.

  And Perrin sent back daggers to her, not bothering to tip his hat. Everyone thinks they deserve respect, but respect has to be earned. He had none for a woman who claimed Major Shin had framed her son, and then didn’t even have the decency to visit that son while he was incarcerated. Not her, and not her husband. And since Poe had been locked up on four separate occasions, the Hilis had ample opportunities to earn Perrin’s disdain.

  He turned away from Mrs. Hili without a second thought. It’d be useless to ask her where Poe was nowadays. She didn’t know, and probably didn’t care, as long as it was far away from Edge.

  Perrin rode on to the edge of the village, past the fields where adults labored while their children stayed home alone. He nodded to a large fat man sitting back on a bale of hay sipping from a mug while he supervised, although Perrin couldn’t understand why he wasn’t out there as planting in his fields; for some reason he felt he was needed more to just sit and watch.

  Taking a short detour, Perrin headed along the road in front of the old rectory, where his Uncle Hogal and Auntie Tabbit used to live. Perrin grinned when he saw who he considered to be the antithesis of Mrs. Hili, and that was exactly what he needed.

  Rector Yung, a tiny old man with mere slits for eyes but an enormous grin, looked up from his front herb garden. He playfully saluted Perrin, and Perrin returned it smartly. Shem had found the lonely widower in Flax and brought him back to be Edge’s rector a year ago after the last rector died.

  While only a few dozen people still attended Holy Day services—everyone else was too busy at the amphitheater, and now the arena, to bother with the words of the Creator—Rector Yung delivered sweet and stirring lessons that reminded Perrin of Hogal. Looking at his faintly yellow skin, Perrin hoped he and the rector shared a common ancestor. The Shins invited him to dinner frequently, and he cheerfully came so that Mahrree could try to fatten up the skinny man.

  Those meals were now the closest thing they had to the after-congregation-meeting midday meals the village used to share each Holy Day. No one sat and chatted about farms or children or the state of the world over chicken and dumplings anymore. In fact, Holy Day had now even changed its name to holiday—a day each week when people worshipped themselves instead of the Creator.

  “Tomorrow, midday meal after the meeting?” Perrin called to Yung, as if the weekly invitation actually needed reissuing.

  The rector held up some new sprigs of parsley. “Of course! Mrs. Shin told me she’s expecting this. She’s down to only her dried preserves in her cellar, and I promised to bring her a fresh supply.”

  Perrin winked at the Shins’ personal supplier of herbs and faith, and kicked the mare into a steady trot, past the dull gray block building that was labeled with the equally bland name of School Building Number 3. There were five of those now in Edge, built by Idumeans for Idumean education. Perrin could barely stand to look at the structure that housed his wife and children for seven hours each day, forcing them to memorize the drivel the Administrators required them to regurgitate on tests twice a year.

  At least Mahrree taught Edge’s special cases—the failing and likely thieving boys whom she had in her After School Care program years ago. She was allowed by Mr. Hegek to take great liberties with the scripts Idumea sent for teachers—

  Actually, Hegek had pleaded with her to do whatever she wanted to make the class interesting enough to keep
the boys in the building, because he was sure the commander of the fort wouldn’t report any of them for stretching the rules so far that they twanged. And since that was exactly what Mahrree was hoping for, she readily agreed.

  Teaching also gave Mahrree access to the mundane scripts sent by the Department of Education so she knew what Jaytsy and Peto were being taught and could counter it at home. Perrin loved the delicious irony that the Administrators’ measures had only provided his family with even more topics to debate illegally at dinner each evening. That’s why Perrin’s perpetual sneer at the School Buildings always slid into a smug smile. Maybe the Administrators felt sure they were succeeding on the surface of things, but like a stomach ailment, nasty things they weren’t expecting still brewed under what seemed to be a calm façade. At least in the Shin family things were always churning.

  Perrin led his horse to the outskirts of Edge and spurred it to a run north along the pathway that followed the canals. He slowed the animal only when the last of the neighborhoods flashed past him and before him lay the fallow fields and the forest beyond. He rode up to the border of the trees and peered in.

  The forest was quiet, except for a steam vent about sixty paces in that seemed to be venting stronger than usual. Otherwise, there was nothing in the sulfur-scented trees.

  He smiled, but without any real joy, as he saw the new recruits mounted on horseback approaching the fresh spring area. Right on time.

  He nudged his horse into the darker shadows of the trees next to the cattle fence and watched from a distance. He knew the sergeant running the new recruits’ drill was describing the dangers of the forest, pointing out the features in the daylight so the young men could see them clearly. The soldiers respectfully nodded, some vaguely interested, but others obviously bored.

  Perrin bristled. It used to be that all recruits were eager and appropriately afraid, but no longer. Over the past decade the young men of the world, probably hardened by their years of thieving, had become calloused and more violent, and eventually turned traitor to their Guarder benefactors to become soldiers. Perrin rarely got anything useful out of the boys about their time as thieves because they really didn’t know much except to leave the goods in one place and pick up a note about what to steal next. Each year the codes changed anyway, so last year’s thieves were nearly useless in harvesting this year’s crop. Their loyalties shifted easily because the army provided steadier wages for eighteen-year-olds than the Guarders ever did.