eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781482892611 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Partridge Publishing Singapore |
| Publication date: | 07/23/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 278 |
| File size: | 425 KB |
| Age Range: | 3 Months to 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Kate Gallagher AND THE ZIMMERMANITE QUEST
By Alan Cumming
Trafford Publishing
Copyright © 2013 Alan CummingAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4907-0024-3
CHAPTER 1
Private Marcus Augustus Zimmerman gripped his staff so tightly that his knuckles turned white. His helmet was a size too large and kept slipping over his eyes, obstructing his view. He pushed it back, then cautiously peered between the battlements at the events unfolding on the bridge out to his right.
There was a gaping hole in the top of the wall further along, where a savage bolt of energy had recently obliterated a section of stone and the soldiers who had hunkered behind it. Fragments of stone had rained down around him. Zimmerman pressed himself tight against the wall until the smoke cleared. He knew the walls had been carved from monumental blocks of granite, and he quietly marvelled at the power that caused them to blow apart with such ease.
He observed the powerful, obese figure of Varak raise his staff, about to fire another blast at the wall. He squeezed his eyes shut, and waited for the explosion, which never eventuated. When he opened his eyes again, another person—this one small and slight by comparison—had been dragged out onto the bridge and hurled at Varak's feet. The tiny figure stood slowly and removed a helmet to reveal a cascade of flowing, black hair that caught the light as she shook it free.
"It's her!" a soldier named Carruthers exclaimed.
"Who?" Zimmerman had only heard of Varak.
"The girl—the one in the prophecy! The Gallagher girl!"
A low murmur buzzed around the top of the fortified wall as more of Hogarth's citizens reached the same conclusion. The noise died away altogether as they watched the girl struggle, encased inside a large, gelatinous bubble of plasma.
"He's got her!"
"She's done for! We're done for!"
Zimmerman silently cursed his luck for having landed on the wrong side in an impending battle, then watched amazed and transfixed as events unfolded, the tide suddenly turned, and the victor became the vanquished. He could hear Varak's muffled screams from where he squatted, and when the screams died away, he couldn't tear his eyes from the red rope of plasma that was being drawn back up inside her staff. Varak had disappeared.
He was still staring when she raised her staff and launched another bolt of energy over the heads of the opposing army. The ensuing shockwave from the thunderclap slammed against the city wall, and Zimmerman's helmet was wrenched from his head. He would have toppled backwards off the top wall walk if Carruthers hadn't grabbed his tunic and held on. His ears were ringing, and he was deafened by the blast as he struggled safely back onto the cobbled pathway.
The girl was still standing on the bridge, unaffected by the blast, which seemed to have bypassed her completely. Then, the unexpected happened as—one by one at first—the opposing army knelt in obeisance before her, and a tumultuous roar erupted from the walls.
The spell had been broken. Soldiers packed their arms and turned in groups for home while the gates of the city opened and people poured out to surround the girl in celebration. Carruthers slapped Zimmerman on the back and shouted gleefully, "That's my kind of war! Over before it started!"
Marcus leaned against the wall and blew out a sigh. He watched the masses of black-suited soldiers disband and considered that they'd all had one lucky escape. This was no sort of life for a geologist.
* * *
His life of respite was short-lived. He was stood down and returned to barracks along with most of Hogarth's army. The soldiers were jubilant because they'd survived possible oblivion and certain enslavement, and the Gallagher girl was the topic of praise on everyone's lips. Zimmerman learned of the Bexus Prophecy—that a golden girl would defeat Varak as foretold by a set of mysterious cave etchings. Few had known of it; even fewer had dared believe in it. Zimmerman didn't think she looked all that golden down on the bridge, but she'd done the job, and had become an instant hit: the Heroine of Hogarth.
Ten days later, it was a different story altogether. The army was on the march, passing through the dreaded Great Forest on its way to Cherath. Rumour and gossip scour a city faster than a flash flood, and the word on the street was that this was the girl's doing. Somehow, she had coerced the city fathers to dispatch the army as a peacekeeping force, to act as a buffer in a probable conflict between the cities of Cherath to the east, and Hornshurst to the north and west.
The mood was one of resentment, and it infected the troops like a virulent flu bug. Marcus Zimmerman was not immune, and he muttered along with the rest of his pals, and cursed the stiff footwear that would have caused blisters back on Earth and continued to cause a similar pain here. He caught glimpses of the Gallagher girl, riding one of those weird, pronged deer at the head of the column, and he wished she'd been made to march alongside the men. Maybe after a few dozen miles, she wouldn't have been quite so keen to whisk them off to war.
Zimmerman's heart sank when they finally reached the vast plain that circled the city of Cherath. It must have been a fertile grassy prairie once upon a time, but after years of neglect it reflected the barren waste of Varak's rule: starved, thirsty, and trampled upon. There was nothing left but dust.
The walls of the city appeared impregnable, even from that distance, but that was the least of Zimmerman's concerns. Another army was encamped in front of the city, and flanks extended out and around to encircle it fully. Zimmerman suddenly felt small and insignificant. All eyes were turned towards them as the soldiers of Hogarth pushed on like eager spectators drawn to a schoolyard brawl.
Commander-in Chief Carter galloped past on his Hon'chai, urging the men forward with the promise of a swift, decisive victory. The Gallagher girl had inherited Varak's throne, and she was about to dispense another thunderbolt and take control. Or so he hopes! thought Zimmerman. He wasn't nearly as confident about that as Carter appeared to be. He was watching the flanks of the Hornshurst army unfurl and curve around towards them like the horns on the head of a colossal bull. It was a standard flanking manoeuvre, opening like the jaws on a steel trap, inviting the unwary to step inside.
The commanders of Hogarth's army weren't that stupid, and the column was halted about five hundred yards out and ordered to form up in a protective wedge that had been an effective defensive strategy since the days of the Roman Empire. Zimmerman stood shoulder-to-shoulder, dripping under the midday heat, and packed in like a sardine with his staff pointing outwards. He waited; he expected something to happen.
He watched the girl peel away from the tip of the wedge, followed by the warrior they called Hawklight. She rode towards the opposing army as if she hadn't a care in the world, and Zimmerman was amazed to see the Hornshurst troops part either side to let her through. They closed ranks again after she'd passed and he lost sight of her.
He continued to wait anxiously for the flash in the sky that would signal the thunderbolt, and he reached subconsciously for his helmet strap and secured it under his chin. There was some sort of commotion along the top of the city wall just above the gates, and something caught his eye as it had flashed briefly in the sunlight before it was gone. Zimmerman could hear raised shouts, and then the girl's clear voice cut through the desert air. Something about a crystal!
He strained to catch the gist of what she was saying and had to piece the fragments of words carried by the wind. The men beside him shuffled nervously; they'd come to the same conclusion that she was surrounded by two hostile armies and totally powerless to prevent anything from happening. Back at Hogarth, they'd had the walls to hunker behind, at least; out here, they were vulnerable and exposed. He heard the stern commands of the NCOs restore order and the disquiet subsided.
And then, to the amazement of all, the imposing gates of the city swung outwards.
* * *
Just before sunset, the Hogarth army was roused, and organised into a loose column five abreast to begin filing through a gap in the Hornshurst lines and take up position on the field in the no-man's land between the two opposing sides.
Zimmerman was now a peacekeeper, made official by the round of complicated negotiations, which Elward Carter oversaw. As with any peacekeeping force, his army was reviled by both sides, each thinking the force favoured the other in any dispute. The men were threatened as they passed between the ranks of Hornshurst soldiers, but the officers on both sides managed to maintain order, and the transition was made without incident.
Zimmerman was just a cog within a cog within the many wheels that made up the army of Hogarth; all he ever did was follow orders. He was part of a group of six troopers, including Carruthers, who were organised to share one tent for the duration of the siege. The men spent the remainder of the dwindling daylight having to erect the tent and sort out their equipment. Zimmerman knew all five of his tent mates; four of them snored. It was going to be a lengthy stay!
He lay awake under his bedroll until the snoring drove him outside. Carruthers had pulled the first watch, but Zimmerman offered to relieve him; he wasn't tired, and he wanted some 'quiet' time, made difficult by the fact that almost all the soldiers slept on their backs while their jaws gaped slackly.
He gazed upwards at the stars, but the ambient light from the many campfires had tempered their intense twinkling. He stirred the embers of their own meagre fire with a broken branch, then added it to the coals, and watched the sparks rise and the smoke swirl before the branch burst into flame. He heard the muffled thump as one of Carruthers' boots was thrown across at a sleeping form, and he smiled to himself as the snoring dropped to a different level of intensity.
He yawned and sat in the dust beside the fire, and drew his collar up against his neck to ward away the chill. He sat like this for some time, hunched forward and staring into the red and black coals until his back grew stiff and sore. He leaned backwards and stretched, placing one palm on the sand for support.
He felt something hard and sharp beneath his hand, and twisted around to investigate. He discovered a couple of stones half-buried in the dirt. He prised them loose and was about to toss them aside when one of them captured the weak firelight and glinted as if the fire were trapped inside it. Zimmerman frowned, and tried to examine the stones more carefully, but the glow from the embers was too dull to see anything clearly. He debated whether he ought to build up the fire and provide more light, but they'd lugged their own firewood across the desolate plains, and he was loathed to use up their precious store on a whim. He pocketed the stones and huddled in the lee of the tent, away from the drifting winds.
Marcus awoke the following morning, stiff from lying on the hard ground with only a blanket as a mattress. His hip was sore where he'd lain on his side, and something hard had dug into him. He remembered the pebbles from the previous evening's watch, and cursed himself for not removing them from his pocket before he'd settled down to sleep. He turned on his back and stretched before he crawled from his bed and laced up his boots once more.
Outside the tent, the day had begun to shunt forward reluctantly. The air was blue with wood smoke and made even hazier by the diffuse light of the early morning sun. Soldiers sat around in clusters, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, splashing their faces with cold water, or soaking up the sun stripped to their undershirts while chatting and laughing. This was the period of grace before the NCOs came stomping through the camp to inflict the latest exercise regime.
Zimmerman sat to one side away from the others and pulled the stones from his pocket. Only, they weren't stones. They weren't like anything he'd seen before. They were two halves of a perfect crystal that had snapped cleanly in two. One of the ends had a gold clasp attached to it, so a chain could be threaded through and the whole thing worn as a pendant about the neck.
In shadow, the crystal was a clear cobalt blue, but when he held it against the light, the colour changed, seeming to pulse with yellows and greens. It remained cold to the touch, despite the warmth his hand generated, and the broken edges had remained razor sharp.
He examined one of the broken faces carefully, and it appeared to his unaided eye that he was looking at a cross section of tiny tubes, much like looking at a tight bunch of straws end on. However, when he turned the crystal section on to its side, he could see clear through the stone, with no sign of the microtubules he would have expected to find. He was mystified, and longed for a jeweller's eyepiece to examine the surface more intricately.
He was so engrossed with the stone's features, he was unaware of anyone nearby until a shadow fell across his lap and blocked out the sun. He glanced up, annoyed by the intrusion, and found himself face to face with Elward Carter and members of his entourage. He hid the stones in his fist, but by then it was too late—Carter had seen what he had been holding.
"Atten—chun!" shouted one of the adjutants, and everyone, Zimmerman included, immediately leapt to their feet and stood ramrod still.
"What's your name, soldier!" Carter barked.
"Private Zimmerman! Sir!"
"You have something in your hand, Zimmerman?"
"Sir! Yes sir!"
"And what is it?"
"Two halves of a crystal, sir. Possibly some form of calcite, due to the observable birefringence, but unlikely because of its hardness and the fact that it's insoluble. It looks orthorhombic, which means it could be related to the olivine or aragonite families, but without closer examination I—"
"I don't need to be bored to death, soldier. I'm searching for a broken crystal left lying in the dirt somewhere around here. You seem to have found it. I want it!" Carter held his hand out, and Zimmerman was left with little choice but to hand it over.
"Thank you." Carter's eyes never left Marcus's as he slipped the stones into the top pocket of his tunic. "Dismissed."
"Sir! Thank you, sir!" Marcus slapped his forearm across his chest, fist closed, by way of an official Hogarth army salute. Carter nodded fractionally, turned on his heels and left, with his coterie of advisers flapping in his wake. Zimmerman watched them leave.
"Why didn't you tell us that you'd found the crystal?" Carruthers demanded as he sidled up to Marcus.
"I don't know what you mean."
"You drongo! That was Varak's crystal, the source of all his power. The girl dropped it in the sand yesterday. She broke it. She never had it the whole time we were marching along behind her, thinking we were invincible."
"So, what's the big deal?"
Carruthers shook his head and gave Zimmerman a What were you thinking? kind of look. "It might have been broken, but it still would have been worth something. Now Carter's got the bloody thing!"
"Tell me about it."
"When Varak killed people, he used the crystal to suck their souls up. It trapped them inside; it trapped their energy. He was able to live off that energy somehow for hundreds of years. She broke the crystal. Why would she want to do that? Now it doesn't work."
Carruthers gave Marcus a queer, rather sly look.
"Saa ... ay! You seemed to know a lot about it." It wasn't quite a question, and Carruthers' tone implied that he suspected Zimmerman knew more than he was letting on.
Zimmerman shrugged. "I used to be a geologist. I find rocks fascinating."
Carruthers yawned in reply and said nothing. He didn't want to risk getting Marcus fired up again about the intricacies of mineral impurities.
* * *
Throughout the following nine weeks, camp life proved to be a monotonous series of patrols, watches and training exercises. Towards the end, the tensions between the two camps escalated, and Marcus was involved as part of a policing team in a running pitched battle in which four people were killed, and numerous ringleaders intent on upsetting the delicate balance of power were arrested.
His tunic had been singed, and he was sitting with a medic who was patching up an open wound in his arm, attempting to staunch the energy leaking away in a steady stream of tiny sparks.
"Ouch!"
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kate Gallagher AND THE ZIMMERMANITE QUEST by Alan Cumming. Copyright © 2013 Alan Cumming. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue, ix,Chapter 1, 1,
Chapter 2, 18,
Chapter 3, 34,
Chapter 4, 51,
Chapter 5, 77,
Chapter 6, 91,
Chapter 7, 103,
Chapter 8, 118,
Chapter 9, 128,
Chapter 10, 144,
Chapter 11, 152,
Chapter 12, 165,
Chapter 13, 187,
Chapter 14, 212,
Chapter 15, 227,
Chapter 16, 246,
Acknowledgements, 255,