his mother had sung to him on the cradleboard and then, because he often requested it, through the years up until her death. “I’m the one who catches you.”
Land on a stone top, leap, land, and leap again.
“You don’t scare me, carnadon. Beer and barley, lead and copper, I’m the Carnadon Man!”
Abel pretended he was crossing the River at one of its rare fording points and must leap from rock to rock to avoid being snatched and eaten. The carnadons lived in hunting packs thick along the riverbanks near the wide spots in the water’s flow. River carnadons were creatures horned with scale. They walked about on land with small legs, but in the water they possessed a powerful swimming tail. Their main feature, however, at least by Abel’s lights, was a large mouth equipped with a jaw on a flexible hinge that could open wide and swallow a young boy whole.
Abel was both terrified and spellbound by River carnadons. When he’d lived in Garangipore as a very young child, one of his first memories was of watching from the terrace porch of the officer’s residence where his family dwelled as carnadons wallowed on the riverbank below. Then in Lindron, his father had taken him to see the Great Tabernacle moats, which were full of well-fed carnadons kept as pets by the high priests.
He’d watched an afternoon feeding and seen the creatures swallow chunks of meat as big as barrels without once chewing. In the River, the creatures made their grisly living on fish and weak land creatures. In Garangipore, he’d seen one bring down a young herbidak that visited the riverbanks to graze. Carnadons also didn’t mind feasting on the occasional villager when they got the chance—a fact which his mother had never let him forget.
I won’t forget, Mamma.
“Teeth all snapping, tails all whapping, try to bite me if you can!”
Even though Abel was only six, he knew that the stone from which the stelae were made was not local. It was rock from the desert wastes beyond the River: the Redlands. Here in the valley, the natural stone was always black or dark brown like river mud unless you dug a hole very deep. You never saw buildings made of stone like this in Lindron, the city where Abel had lived for the past year, and the city where his mother had died. But here in Hestinga, near the Valley Escarpment, there were official buildings and even a few houses made from the red stone.
“You can’t catch me, I’m the Carnadon Man!”
Abel completed his second circuit of the storehouse yard and sprang down. He took the landing with bended knees and rolled as his father had taught him Scouts did when jumping from a rooftop or a cliff. He came up facing the door to the building the stones circled. It had the look of some kind of storehouse, maybe an old granary. The structure was made of the same Redlands stone as the stelae, but the door was of thick-plaited river cane and looked solid, many layers thick. A pile of windblown sand had built up at its base. There were no hinges on the door that Abel could see.
Maybe it swings inside to out, Abel thought. Or maybe it slides to the side into an opening. That would be interesting to see.
Abel had always been good at picturing sizes and arrangements of things in the world, and figuring out how things moved or might look on the other side just by thinking about them. He’d been surprised to find that not everybody could do this, not even some adults.
On the right side of the matted door was a metal plate with a long piece of flat, dark metal emerging from it. Abel moved closer and saw that the flat piece was the shaft of a key. It was sticking out of a keyhole.
Abel had seen metal locks like this before in Lindron on the very old buildings, but this was the first he’d come across in the week they’d lived here in Hestinga. He’d been interested enough to ask his father how locks worked, and his father had demonstrated a wooden version on a small reed chest in his office that held his military credentials and the jade insectoid scarab he used to set a wax seal on official documents.
This key is larger. It’s huge.
Abel approached warily. It was at about eye-height to him. He reached up, touched it.