Elysium: Book Six of The Liminality

Chapter 16: Adalius

Adalius lived in a one-room circular house with mud walls. Its roof was made of a huge and seamless swath of tanned and oiled Reaper hide. It looked like a cross between a traditional African hut and a Mongolian yurt.

He wore a long kilt of a dense and brightly colored cloth that would be thick enough to serve as a throw rug. He went bare-chested, but a sheet of coarse cloth of interwoven with many metal rings, like some sort of crude armor, was cinched around his neck with a braided cord. It draped his shoulders and back like a huge cape.

He was a huge man, both in height and girth. His skin was crusted with the calluses and scales of someone who had spent many years in harsh environment of the Deeps.

"What's wrong with him?" whispered Belinda. "Does he have a disease?"

"He's a Duster. From the Deeps. They all look like that."

Adalius, squatting to tend a fire in his low hearth, swiveled his head abruptly.

"Don't use the D-word around me! Might as well call me a nigger. We are people who been through some shit. That is all."

"I've been there. Done that," said Karla.

Adalius snorts.

"The Deeps? You?"

"I know I don't look it. But it's a long story. I was only there a short while. I was with the hordes mostly. Chasing the Horus."

"You lucky. I knew tons of folks who spent more time there than their whole lifetime on Earth. Me, I did sixteen hundred song cycles. And I still got it going in me."

Belinda looked to Karla, puzzled.

"It's part of their culture. How time is kept. In the Deeps."

"Huh?"

Karla was too tired to explain any further.

"We do appreciate you providing us shelter for the night," said Karla.

The fire was going good now and crackling from the resinous logs he had set among the tinder. From a bowl he draped several slabs of pale meat onto a grill of grooved and slotted stone.

"Not a problem at all," said Adalius. "It's kinda nice to get some company for a change. Buster, he's a good listener, but he's not very chatty. I go out and talk to him a lot, but he don't give a shit about my philosophies. He just wanna be my friend and get fed."

"You're a philosopher?" said Belinda.

Adalius chuckled. "Everybody gets a philosophy if they're in the afterlands long enough. You just wait. You'll get yours too."

The meat on the grill was already crackling from the high heat of the fire. He scraped it free of the grill with a spatula from from a large sharp flake of stone and flipped it.

"Those aren't roots you're cooking," said Karla. "That has to be real meat."

"Cricket. Sorry there ain't no leg meat left. Me and Buster had that for lunch."

"Your Reaper eats bugs?" said Karla.

"Better that than people."

"You eat bugs?" said Belinda.

"Sure enough. They tasty. You ever have lobster? Insects grow pretty big around here in case you haven't noticed."

"How large?"

"Big as horses."

"No way!"

"Or bigger! I found some woods way deep in these hills they got rhino beetles the size of tanks."