Urbane Read online

  Praise for Crecheling:

  “Vibrant and dangerous.”

  —Attack of the Books

  “Crecheling is an exciting, somber, exuberant, measured coming-of-age story on multiple levels, not the least being incorporating readers as well as characters into its meaning. And it is a perfect opening to more stories … and more.”

  —Dr. Michael R. Collings

  “The action-packed plot is full of twists that will keep you on the edge of your seat.”

  —Sarah E. Seeley

  Book Description

  “Children, there is death in the world.”

  These words catapulted Dyan of Buza System into a nightmare of initiation, betrayal, flight, and murder. Against all odds, Dyan survived the Cull and so did Jak, the young man she was supposed to kill.

  Now Jak and Dyan go back into Buza System. Dyan’s mother is held prisoner there and scheduled to be executed for letting her daughter live. Rescuing her will push Dyan and Jak to the limits, unveiling to them the dark secrets at the heart of Buza System, and teaching them the truth of Magister Zarah’s words:

  “Every Urbane knows the secret of life—that it is cheap, and easily taken.”

  Digital Edition – 2016

  WordFire Press

  wordfirepress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-427-5

  Copyright © 2016 D.J. Butler

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Art Director, Kevin J. Anderson

  Cover artwork images by Dollar Photo Club

  Edited by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, Inc.

  PO Box 1840

  Monument, CO 80132

  Contents

  Praise for Crecheling:

  Book Description

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles by D.J. Butler

  Dedication

  For Grace Shelby Perry,

  an early reader,

  who is awesome.

  Prologue

  The Wahai

  Jak sat on the back of the stolen horse and looked down into the Treasure Valley. The valley’s name was ancient, at least as old as the settlement where Jak had grown up—Ratsnay Station, a stockade village of farmers and herders to the east and south of where Jak was now, and not far from the ruins of Farkill. Jak could not go home for fear that his mere presence would endanger the life of his only remaining family, his mother, Rosyn.

  His sister Aleena had been taken from his family five years ago in what Magister Stanton and the other people of the System had called the Selection, but which had turned out also to be called, by Systemoids in the know, the Cull. Aleena and the four taken from Ratsnay Station with her, ostensibly to be brought into the System, were instead marked for ritual slaughter. In this way, inhabitants of the System were made; every Systemoid was a murderer. But Aleena, somehow, had survived and had taken to a life under a false name on the edges of the mountainous Wahai only to be killed as an outlaw in front of Jak just a few days ago, sliced to pieces by a young woman, a Creche-leaver of Buza System.

  Murdering Aleena had made the Creche-leaver advance to the status of an Outrider, one of the mounted and far-riding enforcers of the Buza System. With their monofilament whips and bolas and their vibro-blade knives, the Outriders brought outlaws and renegades to the justice of the System, and kept the Basku and the Shoshan of the Wahai, as well as the people in the various settlements around Treasure Valley, in line.

  Jak refused to be kept in line.

  The savage events of recent weeks had separated Jak from his family and his home. They had also stripped him of his best friend, a fellow Landsman youth of Ratsnay Station named Eirig. Orphaned Eirig had grown up as Jak’s brother, and to save Jak he had first given up to the vengeful servants of the System one arm, and then his life.

  But Jak was not alone.

  Warm autumn breeze riffling his short hair, he turned to look at his companion. Dyan was short and slight, almost boyish in her figure. She was naturally fair, so the recent days of sun had spattered thick clouds of freckles on both cheeks and onto her forearms, when they showed from beneath the black Magister’s cloak she had taken from one of her defeated enemies.

  He had called her Systemoid when they’d met because Dyan had been a Crecheling, a child raised in the nurseries of the System. Dyan had further been a Magister-designate, intended to become one of the teachers and supervisors of the young in the System’s twisted structure, and Jak had taken her prisoner and used her as a hostage. As bad luck and misunderstanding and rivalry had turned Dyan’s Crechemates against her, Jak had come to see her as a fellow refugee, and then a friend, and then, finally, as something more than a friend.

  He had offered to be her Goodman.

  They couldn’t go back to his home, or to hers, but Jak offered to travel with Dyan into the wilderness and take up farming or sheep. She had accepted, and her acceptance had given Jak a thrill he was too weary to describe. So close on the heels of Eirig’s self-sacrifice, muted by exhaustion, and all but snuffed out by fear, the joy of her “yes” had flowed through him like a spring gushing water onto sunbaked desert clay.

  But then she had shared with him a revelation.

  Magister Zarah, the woman who, as Dyan’s final Magister, had brought her to Ratsnay Station to carry out her part in the Cull and thereby become herself a Magister and an Urbane, a full adult participant in the System; the woman whose words had assigned Dyan to kill Jak by her own hand, was Dyan’s mother. Dyan had learned it from Zarah herself, in a midnight conversation during their flight, and had it confirmed by Shad and Cheela, her former Crechemates and now both Outriders on their trail.

  Zarah, Dyan’s mother, had let Dyan and Jak escape. And for that crime, she was now imprisoned somewhere within the System, awaiting execution.

  Jak turned to look again at the System itself.

  He was Redcap Rider, he told himself, on his flying horse and charging the Sea Ogre to rescue the Chained Maiden. He tightene
d the muscles of his stomach and raised his chin.

  The Buza System, another in the constellation of ancient names, lay along the Buza River. The buildings of the System were all of white stone and the river fed lush parks and gardens. The band of white, green, and late-autumn red cut across a desert that was otherwise a bleached yellow sea of tall dry grasses beneath the watchful stare of the Jawtooth Mountains. Only now were the snowpack’s on the highest peaks of the Jawtooths beginning to disappear.

  The System filled the valley of the Buza River at the eastern edge of the Treasure Valley, with the foothills of the Jawtooths along one side and a bluff and plateau on the other. Jak stood at the edge of the Wahai, a mountain wilderness on the far western edge of the Treasure Valley. Between him and the System lay the Lull Sea, with Nemap on one shore and Cowell on the other and the Dam at its far northern and western corner, and many miles of desert grass.

  “I don’t know how to do this,” Dyan said. She looked at the System. Jak wanted to remind her they could still walk away. They could risk the ancient spirits Pistols and Guns and make their home in the ruins of Farkill. Or they could pass Farkill and keep going to far Satulak in the south. But he didn’t.

  “I think,” he said instead, “we need to get me something more appropriate to wear.”

  Chapter One

  As the ship carrying them across the Lull Sea neared Nemap on the far side, Dyan started to express reservations.

  It was not the same ship that had carried them across in the other direction a few days earlier. This was a good thing. Jake had no interest in attracting any more attention than he needed. They’d traded their horses for passage rather than paying with anything more distinctive—like the System’s square metal Scrip tokens, or a pair of monofilament bolas—in order to avoid standing out.

  Even the horses were distinctive enough, being the muscular steeds of the System’s Outriders, rather than the Shoshan ponies more common in Nemap.

  “You probably already realize this,” Dyan said to him over the call of water birds and the slap of waves against the ship’s hull, “but the penalty for most crimes in the System is death.”

  “You’re nervous,” Jak said.

  “No. I’m scared. I don’t want to be hanged.”

  The ship’s captain, a heavyset Basku in a green cap, shouted instructions to his Basku crew. Jak liked the fact that they all spoke to each other in Basku. It made him worry less about the crew being interrogated by the Outriders, who were a day or two behind him at most. Cheela and Shad were their names; they had been Dyan’s Crechemates, had tried to kill her and Jak, and Jak and Dyan had taken their horses and left them in the middle of the Wahai. They hadn’t killed Cheela and Shad, which might have been a mistake.

  Of course, for all Jak knew, Outriders learned Basku. It certainly might be useful to the two who were trying to make their way out of the mountains.

  Would the Basku eat the horses Dyan and Jak had given them?

  Jak held Dyan’s hand. “I’m scared, too.” He didn’t need to offer to turn around and run with Dyan; he had already made that offer. She knew it was still good, and he knew she’d never accept it.

  “I don’t feel like I have any choice in this.”

  “You do, though,” Jak said. “It’s the same choice we had with Aleena.”

  “We could walk away and let Zarah die.”

  “But we won’t.” He squeezed her hand. “You won’t.”

  “Why won’t I?”

  The slouching Nemap docks grew nearer. A three-legged dog sniffed the air and then got up and limped away. Probably disappointed that he didn’t smell meat in their cargo.

  “Because you’re good.” Jak squeezed her hand again.

  Dyan shook her head, fair hair falling around her face. “That isn’t it.”

  “Then tell me why you think you’re doing it.”

  “I think it’s because I understand her,” Dyan suggested.

  Jak’s eyes met hers as he raised a brow in question.

  “I think in her place I would have done the same thing. If I knew I had a child, and I had the possibility of watching over the child and seeing her to maturity, I think I’d do it. I’d take any risk.”

  “That can’t be everything,” Jak said.

  “Why not?”

  “I think you understand your friends the Outriders, too.”

  “Shad and Cheela.”

  “I saw you with that bola at Cheela’s throat. If you’d had to I think you would have taken her head off, understanding or no.”

  “She had just killed Eirig.”

  The force of her words hit Jak in the chest like a hammer. “Yes,” he managed to squeak out. “But I think there’s something else, too. Another reason we’re going in after your Magister.”

  Dyan nodded. “I want to know what else Zarah can tell me.”

  “You want to know who your father is.”

  The ship bumped against the dock, and two Basku sailors jumped ashore to begin tying lines to metal cleats to hold the vessel in place.

  “If you had asked me when we met,” Dyan said, “I’d have said I didn’t care who my father and mother were. I mean, who provided the basic biological material. I’d have said it didn’t matter, and I’d have meant it.”

  “Everything’s changed though, hasn’t it?” Jak said. He arced a finger in the direction of Nemap to point beyond the seaside town and in the general direction of the System. “You had a family.”

  “It was the System,” Dyan agreed. “Buza System was my family.”

  “Your family—the System—cast you out,” Jak said. Shouldering his pack, he stepped onto the dock and helped Dyan follow him. “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any family left.”

  “I have Zarah,” Dyan said. She wasn’t focusing on Jak, she was looking into the distance, thinking about something.

  “You have me,” Jak said.

  “And I may have a father.” Dyan looked into Jak’s eyes. “I want to know. And I want to save Zarah, if I can.”

  “I’ll help you. But it isn’t for Zarah. She let me go, but not before she tried to have you kill me.”

  “But I didn’t do it.”

  “But she tried.”

  “Did she have a choice? I mean, really?”

  “Of course she did, Dyan. We all choose, all the time.”

  “You don’t have to help me.”

  “I’ll help. I’ll do everything I possibly can. But I’m doing it for you.”

  “We might be hanged.”

  Jak laughed and started walking up the dock. “You need to act more like a Magister,” he said, pointing at her black cloak. “Remember, I’m just your hired guide.”

  “Jass,” she said.

  “Magister Dana,” he shot back.

  “Hopefully no one realizes I’m not wearing the medallion that goes with the Calling.”

  “But don’t you see? If I’m caught, I’m hanged already. Or chopped to bits, or stabbed, or whatever. I’ve been under a sentence of death since I was Selected for the Cull. There’s just nothing more they can do to me. It’s kind of liberating, actually.”

  “They could torture you,” Dyan said.

  Jak stopped at the end of the dock. A cart of baked goods wrapped in brown paper rolled by; the smell of cake made his empty belly grumble. “They do that?”

  Dyan shrugged. “Not often. But the Cogitant Council sometimes orders it for really serious offenses.”

  “Like surviving the Cull?”

  Dyan laughed, and the uptick in her spirits made Jak’s step feel lighter. “I don’t know for sure, because I never actually knew what the Selection really was until I saw it … but I don’t think so. I think you get tortured if you do things that really threaten the System.”

  “Like lead a revolt.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like … rescue a condemned prisoner?”

  Dyan hesitated. “Maybe,” she finally said.

  “Huh.” Jak scratche
d the very light stubble on his chin. He wasn’t much of a beard-grower. “Well, let’s hope we don’t find out.”

  “So I’m scared.”

  “Well, I’ll stop when you tell me to. In the meantime, I don’t hear you saying mere theft will get you tortured.”

  “Nope.” Dyan shook her head. “Just hanged.”

  “Good.” Jak rubbed his fingers together. “In that case, let’s find someone from the System. I’d like an Outrider, but I’ll take anyone in the right clothing.”

  “You want a vibro-blade or something? Why would you want an Outrider in particular?”

  Jak shook his head. “I’m scared of cutting myself to pieces if I use any of those weapons. I just want the hat.”

  In the end, he rented a room at a small inn built of adobe bricks sagging at one end of the waterfront and left Dyan there. Dyan was a much better fighter than Jak because she was skilled in the use of the System’s monofilament weapons, but in her Magister garb, and without the five-fingered medallion Magisters usually wore, she risked attracting attention.

  Also, she was exhausted.

  They’d need the right clothing to get them into the System, Jak thought. He thought it mostly an exercise in imagination since he’d never actually been to the System. But here in Nemap, he didn’t want anyone asking inconvenient questions.

  Dyan gave him a jingling purse full of Scrip. She’d taken it from the body of Haika, a Magister who’d come after them with Shad and Cheela, and whom Dyan had killed by bashing in her skull with a rock. In Ratsnay Station, Jak had never used Scrip, just bartered things for other things, and when the System’s Collectors came to claim the System’s share of the annual harvest, they also took crops and animals rather than trying to convert any of it into currency.

  Still, Jak had an idea of what Scrip was, and he could read, and the values of the different pieces were printed right on the coins, so it only took a minute’s explanation before the jingling purse felt right in his hand.

  He also borrowed Dyan’s black Magister cloak, which he folded up and tucked under his shirt to hide it.

  Then he went looking for trouble.