Bloodrush (The Scarlet Star Trilogy Book 1) (21 page)

‘Makes sense. Question is, you a fan of buffalo?’

Merion’s head jolted up. ‘Buffalo?’ Aunt Lilain had spoken of them, of their horns and hooves. He had yearned to see one then, and he could not help but yearn now, despite how damn tired he was.

‘Whole herd, coming in from the north. Look here.’

Merion rolled onto his knees and shuffled, rather gracefully, it has to be said, through the sand and grit to where Lurker was standing with one foot on a small, knobbly rock. He pointed with an arm, and Merion squinted into the haze.

‘I don’t see anything,’ he said, the disappointment clear in his dry voice.

‘Look harder.’

‘Well that helps. I really don’t—Wait.’

A dark line had appeared in the shivering heat waves, a line that reached for miles across the horizon. It was then that Merion felt the fear in the ground, the nervous trembling of the sand around his knees. Hooves. Thousands upon thousands of hooves, battering the earth in thunderous unison. The dark line grew thicker as the mighty heard came closer. Merion could hear them now: a low rumble in the air, interrupted by the occasional trumpeting bellow. Merion began to pick out the galloping shapes of the faster beasts, the ones outstripping the rest and leading the way. With every bone-shattering stride, the buffalo drew nearer, until Merion’s heart began to jolt along with their frenzied rumble.

For one stomach-churning moment, it looked as though the herd would swing towards them, but then they turned again, and veered east and away from them, down into a slight dip in the land.

The buffalo were enormous. Taller and wider than a carriage, and veritably dripping with muscle. Their shaggy black manes danced and streamed behind them, flecked with white spit from their heaving, slavering mouths. They seemed like furious, skin-wrapped steam engines for all their snorting and grunting. Merion wagered that had it been cold, they would have looked the part as well. It was the buffalos’ horns that thrilled him the most. Curved, long, and deadly, they looked to be made of iron instead of simple horn, even going so far as to glint in the sun, as any metal worth its salt would.

Lurker waited until the very last wheezing buffalo had hobbled past before he spoke, almost as though his words might have ruined the spectacle. ‘Don’t ever want to get on the wrong side of a buffalo, boy, trust me on that one.’

‘And trust me, I don’t intend to,’ Merion said, putting a hand to his chest to steady his heart.

Lurker snorted, and took the opportunity to fish out his pipe and a fresh pinch of tobacco. ‘Full o’ strange old wonders, this part of the world,’ he mumbled around the mouthpiece of his pipe.

Merion shuffled back to his shoes. He eyed them as a passer-by might look at a soiled, drunken tramp on the street. He wanted to spit on them, never mind piss on them. As he painfully eased them back on, he noticed that they were rapidly falling apart. He cursed under his breath.

‘Are those things lined with velvet, Hark?’

Merion rolled his eyes. ‘Indeed they are,’ he muttered.

‘Shit, boy. And worn down to a thread, I see. You’d better pray we meet a roamin’ trader on the way; otherwise you’ll be walking the desert in your socks. That ain’t something I would go recommendin’.’

Merion didn’t exactly relish the thought either. ‘Wonderful,’ he grunted.

*

He could smell the earthy tang of the leather, the dusty scent of paper and books. He ran his hands over the dark wood of his father’s desk, watching how his fingers changed colour under the sunlight pouring through the towering stained-glass windows. Blue, green, red, and every colour in between, broken only by the tall shadow standing mere feet away, staring at the kaleidoscopic world outside the cavernous study.

Merion lifted a fist to his mouth and coughed politely. The shadow turned slightly. A stern, angular face looked back over the stark line of a muscled shoulder. Merion waved.

‘Hullo father,’ he said, his voice sounding sluggish and faint in the dream.

‘Have you found him yet?’ asked Karrigan. His lips had barely moved. His voice sounded faraway and on the brink of being lost.

Merion furrowed his brow. ‘Pardon me?’

‘My murderer, Tonmerion.’

The younger Hark shook his head, flushing red. ‘I’m trying my best, father. This man, Lurker … he’s taking me to—’

‘It’s not good enough.’

Merion’s eyes itched as they began to water. He forced himself not to reach up and rub them.
A sign of weakness.
‘Father … please,’ he whispered. ‘I will find him, I promised you.’

Karrigan turned back to the paned glass and sighed. ‘Beans, Merion.’

‘Father?’

‘Beans.’

‘I don’t understand…’

‘Beans I said, you listenin’, boy?’

Merion’s eyes snapped open, letting reality flood back into them. His head lolled as he shook off the dizziness of the dream.

Lurker was brandishing a dirty wooden spoon at him. A little cluster of brown beans clung to it for dear life. ‘Don’t you be fallin’ asleep on me yet. You eat when I eat, remember? Got to get some food in your stomach before your head hits the pillow. This ain’t the sort of place you want to wake up hungry. Here, have some beans.’

Merion rubbed his eyes with the palms of his dusty, dirty hands and blinked the sleep out of his eyes. He peered down into the bubbling pot Lurker had suspended over the timidly crackling flames. Beans, indeed. ‘Is there any bread?’

‘No sir.’

‘No bacon?’

Lurker just chuckled at that.

Merion’s stomach rumbled painfully. ‘Any meat at all?’ he whined.

Lurker looked up from stirring his pot. There was a hint of a scowl on his face. Little did Merion know that beans were very important to a man like Lurker. Beans could be counted upon. Beans could warm a soul as well as a stomach. Beans could turn a rough day on the road right around.

And here was Merion, turning his nose up at them.

‘Well, seeing as my ole pap’s recipe ain’t good enough for you…’ Lurker paused to thrust a hand into his nearby pack. There was a moment of rummaging, during which Merion’s stomach rumbled with hope as well as hunger, and then Lurker threw something at him, a little slab of something hard and no-doubt chewy, wrapped up in grease paper and string. ‘…you can have what’s left of my jerky. Carve off a piece, go on.’

‘I don’t have a—’

Steel flashed as a knife spun over the flames and landed in the sand inches from Merion’s knee. The boy tried to quell the shaking in his hand as he tugged the blade free. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered.

‘Welcome.’

A bowl was filled with beans and passed across the fire. The beans were big and soft, and the sauce they swam in was thick and rich, deep with spices and smoke. Merion was instantly apologetic. ‘These beans are incredible, Lurker.’

Lurker didn’t look up. He just kept slipping beans into his mouth, one by one, eating like a grizzled old turtle might. He managed a brief, ‘Thank you,’ between spoonfuls.

The jerky was tongue-numbingly salty, but it too was rich and spicy. Merion had never tasted anything like it. It was like chewing on a boot, sure, but a tasty boot at that. The boy soon gave up on the knife and simply just started tearing chunks off with his teeth.

Three bowls of beans and half the jerky later, (some of which was surreptitiously slipped into his rucksack), Merion was once again dancing along the edges of a deep sleep. Lurker had already packed away the pot and stoked up the fire, and while Merion pulled his blanket tighter around his shoulders and rocked back and forth, fighting sleep, Lurker began to work on something. It was difficult to see, but it was definitely something to do with Merion’s shoes. Lurker looked to be attacking them with his knife.

‘Are we safe here?’ Merion asked, gazing around dazedly at the little wind-cut horseshoe of red rock they had made camp in. They were halfway up a sharp hill, all chiselled at the sides, and hidden away quite nicely in a hollow. Rhin was stowed away in the rucksack and kept close at hand beside Merion’s right knee. Jake was curled up in a black feathery ball on the left-hand side of the fire, snoring in little hissing gasps.

Lurker nodded as he worked. ‘Safer than most, that’s for sure,’ he replied, distracted.

‘That’s hardly comforting,’ Merion mumbled.

‘Last night we had the protection of the town. The bigger things are drawn further west, to where the railroad and the worker camp is. We sort of snuck out the back.’

‘But we’re nowhere near the town now.’

‘No, we’re closer to Seragho River, off to the east, see? If we’d a moon tonight you’d see it lie like a silver snake, curving through the hills.’ Lurker waved his little blade at the ragged horizon and speckled heavens.

Merion took another peek at the night sky, and not for the last time that evening shook his head at the sheer number of stars and dusty swirls it had to offer. He had never seen a sky like this in London. It was alien and other-worldly, as if the
Tamarassie
had taken him to the moon instead of the New Kingdom. The night breeze blew cold, and Merion shivered.

‘I’d wager that Lord Serped is chugging along it right now in that grand riverboat of his, on his way to Fell Falls.’

That woke Merion up a bit. ‘Right now?’ he asked. He had forgotten all about the Serpeds in his rush to follow Lurker. But his momentary excitement sank almost as quickly as it had surfaced. There was nothing he could do about them now. They could be a back-up plan, he decided, and nodded affirmatively to himself, inwardly congratulating himself on his shrewdness. Father would be proud.

He
will
be proud.

Lurker was still chuntering away. Merion had not imagined such a stoic and silent fellow to be so talkative around a campfire. Perhaps it was simply more comfortable for him out here, with a ceiling of stars, a rock for a bed, and a belly full of beans.

‘… but this ain’t wraith country no more, so don’t you worry ‘bout them. Not yet, anyway.’

‘Again, comforting.’

‘It’s the little things you got to watch out for, in these parts,’ Lurker looked up and met Merion’s eyes. ‘The things that don’t look harmless until they bite you. Half the time you don’t know you’ve been bitten until the bastards have sucked a pint of blood out of you.’ Lurker stared, and Merion stared right back. The boy suddenly felt itchy, as though he could already feel tiny teeth testing his skin, or little claws climbing under his clothes. He involuntarily shivered.

‘You mean like insects?’ Merion scratched at his neck.

Lurker broke eye contact and went back to whatever he was doing. ‘Among other things. The sort of things Lil likes to collect.’

Merion could not help but put a hand on his rucksack. ‘What exactly
is
her fascination with cutting up strange animals?’

Lurker tugged at the brim of his hat. ‘I’ll let Lil tell you all about that when we get back.’

‘And here I was thinking I was actually going to find some answers in this desert.’

‘In a few days, you’ll have them,’ mumbled Lurker, and there was a finality in his voice that made Merion hold his tongue for once. He hunkered down, ignoring how cold his back was compared to his roasting front, and tried to ignore the lack of feeling in his legs. Sleep clawed at him, dragging him down. Tiredness seeped into his bones and muscles and pulled at his eyelids. The fire began to grow blurry, then disappeared altogether into darkness and vacuous silence.

Merion ran his hands across the dark wood of the desk, and wiggled his fingers in the stained light…

*

Lurker waited, his head slumped on his chest, until the boy was snoring soundly. He tongued his yellow teeth thoughtfully while he stared over the ochre flames. Jake had awoken, and was now looking between his master and Merion. If a magpie could have tutted, Jake did.

Lurker threw him a look. ‘Don’t you be judging me now, bird,’ he whispered.

Jake ruffled his feathers and clacked his beak disapprovingly.

Lurker shook his head. ‘Cantankerous magpie,’ he muttered. He spent a little while drumming his fingers on his knee before reaching for his battered old flask. He shook it, making it gurgle, then fished a small corked vial out of a pocket deep in his coat, half-full of a dark crimson liquid. Jake watched with his beady black eyes as Lurker pulled the cork out with his teeth and a dribbled a few drops of the thick liquid into the flask.