Faces (2 page)

(no please what’s happened to his)

face she cried out, spun through a circle, looked again but couldn’t unsee what she’d seen, and ran from the forge. If he had called after her, even her name, even just a wordless cry, perhaps she could have found the courage to stay, but here came that slippery, kaleidoscopic haze again, splitting and doubling her thoughts, and although she resisted it, somewhere in that haze came a knowledge that this was ordained, this was right. Gallardi was bound to his place. Her dreams would not change that.

(‘Can we winch it?’ Gallardi asked in her memory as they stood looking at this thing they had found. It was hard not to stare. The thing’s shape had a way of pleasing the eye, leading it softly along curves and through gentle turns. Jann thought of the strange, scalloped lines of the fungi that grew in the coolways under the hive-sprawls where they took their leave rotations, and then she thought of the lines of the muscled arms and shoulders of the boy she’d stepped out with when last she’d been there. That made her redden, but none of the others had noticed. Crussman and Heng were talking in quiet voices, Gallardi was simply looking at it. It was a made thing, but all the made things Jann had ever seen had the sledgehammer-heavy arrogance of Imperial design, all blocky angles and hard surfaces. Here Jann couldn’t see a single straight line or flat plane. She didn’t quite dare walk closer to it, none of them did until they’d told Merelock what they’d found, but she hunkered down and leaned forwards to stare at it. If those were control grips, then that had to be a seat, and if that were a seat then those things behind it were running-boards like their crane-buggy had, for them all to hitch and ride on? And along the back, under a tangle of shimmering cloth whose colours seemed to ripple and shiver in the corner of her eye… an engine? A mechanism? Or a container? A saddle-pannier? Jann wondered if there were cargo in there, what this thing had been carrying, and how bitter it was to her now that they had not smashed the thing, burned it with their torches, driven the crane-buggy back and forth and back and forth over the cargo panniers, treading them to splinters without any of them ever opening them and looking inside.)

Her eyes blurred with tears as she ran up the stairs and she misjudged the width of the exit. The ends of the torque-stave clanged into the doorframe and it bent her over at the midriff, unhurt but groaning with shock. The stave fell from her hands and she folded and dropped through the doorway, crawling clumsily onward without thinking to pick it up.

When she remembered it, she pushed herself against a dry, slick wall, and clambered half-upright. This was the storage level, a maze of tiny paths winding between the dark stacks of bales and drums and pallets. She leaned against the heavy plastic wrap around a stack of filter-blocks and looked around.

High, clear laughter drifted up through the red-lit door down into the forge, and her stave was gone.

Jann’s breath caught in her throat but she made herself move. Her hands grasped air. This place was cramped, smothering whatever marginal use the stave would have had as a weapon, but it still felt like too much of a loss. She told herself it was a rusted, useless torque-stave only fit for Tokuin’s scrap-furnace, but the feeling that she had lost a part of herself clung to her as she shuffled away from the forge door. The stacked pallets and drums were all edges and angles, no soothing circles, and she could feel her chest hitching and jerking, wanting to echo the laughter she had heard.

‘He must fight on his own,’ Merelock’s voice murmured at her shoulder, and although Jann made to jerk and scream with the shock, all that she gave was a gentle shudder and gasp. As Jann half-turned Merelock placed the torque-stave in her hands.

‘A staff should no more be left in the grass than a spear, little cousin,’ Merelock whispered. Her voice doubled on itself, acquired an echo. ‘’Twould be good to have you running at my flank, little one, if you’ll stay with me. Green and white above the trees.’ The sentence made no sense to Jann but the words had an odd power over her, and she tilted her head back as though she could look up through the thick walls and roof and see a night sky where the green and the white…

But Merelock was away, darting through the narrow spaces between the stacks. Jann smiled as she glided along behind, picturing Merelock as a night-hunting raptor, beak sharp as a spear, talons slitting the air, eyes as keen as its talons staring into the green-tinged darkness. But that laughter from the forge door would not leave her head now, and she found herself wanting to laugh, too, softly sing as she ran to and fro.

‘On and ahead, cousin!’ came the gruff hunter’s whisper down the trail, and Jann quickened her pace even though she knew it was only Merelock’s reedy voice from the other side of a pallet of hygiene packs. ‘On and ahead to the Great Caern! We’ll touch the stone for luck and turn about to hunt them!’

The geography of this place unfolded in Jann’s mind with the quiet certainty of dream-knowledge, but as she ran up and down the aisles between the stores, her stave clanging awkwardly against crates and fittings, she was more and more aware that the place she was running through seemed phantom-like. Her mind kept dancing away through some great forest (she was sure that was the word; the last supervisor, Merelock’s predecessor, had read books and had described forests to them), gliding between the boles of trees, up into the rich canopy, slipping along through the underbrush, airy as a moonbeam, following her fierce hawk.

All the places of the forest were known to her, their names talismanic weights in her mind. The Great Caern, the Tree of Hands, the Crying River, the Sky Hearth. Glorious places, wild places, and Jann cried out because
now
she was singing her dreams in the sky over the forest to a chorus of wind-chimes, and
now
she was tottering back and forth in a cramped and grubby storeroom, watching her portly little supervisor trotting ahead brandishing a splintered piece of pallet like some sort of spear, exulting at a mad beauty that she couldn’t convince herself she was really seeing, laughing in the dark while her friend shuffled around in the forge with Tokuin’s blood on his hands, crippled and beaten and… chained?

There was that strange ghost-certainty again. Chained? She had seen no chains. Gallardi had killed Tokuin and taken the forge as his own. Why did her mind cling to the memory of him defeated and bound?

Pad-pad-pad
came Merelock’s feet around the end of the aisle. The supervisor had kicked off her workboots and was running barefoot, leaving bloody prints from where something had cut into her left heel. She had plastered engine grease across the rank swatches on her jacket and crude garlands of torn fabric flopped around her brow and her biceps. She shook the spear in one hand. Her other, Jann realised, was dangling at the end of a broken arm.

‘This isn’t the path,’ said Jann, propping her stave across the aisle to block Merelock’s way. ‘Ma’am? Merelock, do you even know where you are? Do you recognise this place? Do you recognise me?’

The other woman stopped with her belly up against the pitted metal of Jann’s torque-stave, then stepped back and hefted her spear. Jann suppressed a wince as Merelock’s broken arm banged against a crate corner, but the supervisor didn’t even seem to notice. In the dimness her

(how could I have ever thought that was her real)

face was impassive, perhaps a little watchful. The designs around her eyes and across her cheekbones curled like rich summer leaves, like falcon-wings.

‘What strange questions you ask, little cousin! Have you been dreaming again? You should have asked me before you came down to sleep. There are places where it’s not safe to sleep, and your dreams are too precious for any of us to risk. Enemies make their way into the wild places, cousin. Stay close to my side.’

‘Merelock, listen to me! Where are you? Can you tell me where you are? Can you describe where you are? Do you know what happened to Gallardi and Tokuin?’

‘I…’ Merelock began, and then straightened. Her broken arm still hung but the other lifted her makeshift spear in a pose that brought back to Jann that maddening deja vu. ‘I run the trail like the moon and the wind, little cousin. I am the sound of my horn and the flight of my spear. When the nights chill and the green moon walks silent and alone, so there do I walk under it.’

Other voices, other sounds. Something danced in Jann’s vision like the ghost of a hololith display in the instant after it was shut down. Merelock seemed to stand in the centre of a larger form, something tall and mantled in beast-pelts, lifting a lean arm, her/his words wrapped around by the dim sounds of wild horns and quick breathing. Merelock’s voice struggled for power and melody but Jann could feel the words coming from that other silhouette too. Their rhythm made her want to chorus along, dance in a circle with her stave lifted high before she could laugh and sing, leap and hang in the air, shine high and bright above…

The sensation was like jolting awake just before the final release into sleep: Jann broke the reverie, pulled back from the brink, immediately felt guilty at disbelieving that beautiful voice. Before the guilt could lull her and draw her under again she gritted her teeth, squeezed her eyes almost shut and hit Merelock’s broken arm with a clumsy, looping blow.

The supervisor wailed in pain, but although she lurched she did not fall and the chunk of pallet stayed gripped in her fist the way the stave stayed gripped in Jann’s. For a moment, behind the sound, something in the darkness that might have been a sigh or a chuckle, but when Jann cocked her head to listen it was gone.

‘I am wounded, but not beyond fighting or mending,’ said Merelock, bent halfway to one knee before Jann and cradling her arm. ‘But see, Jann?’ Jann shook her head, not understanding, and for a moment not recognising the name Merelock had used. Her name, she was sure, should be longer, softer, more like a breathy lullaby on the tongue.

‘See, now?’ Merelock went on. ‘See how wrong it all is? My own domain, my hunting-paths. I climbed to spy and wait for my enemies and the bough cast me down. Wouldn’t bear my weight.’ Her head swimming, Jann got a hand under Merelock’s good shoulder and helped her to her feet, craning over her shoulder to follow the woman’s gaze. Her first thought was that of course it wouldn’t have borne weight: she was looking at a ripped stretch of tarpaulin over stacked drums of distilled water, and who would ever think that Merelock’s stout, stiff-limbed little frame would let her clamber up there without something going wrong? And yet it made perfect sense to her when Merelock talked of the stack as though it were a great tree, and one that had done her a personal wrong by breaking its branch and letting her fall. Falling. Falling and hurting. Jann breathed hard, shook her head, reminded herself of her purpose.

‘Look at it again, Merelock. Please, ma’am. Is it what you think it is? Look at me, do you see your cousin? I think I almost have what it is that’s happening to us, ma’am, almost in my mind, but will you help me to try and understand it?’ She could hear herself cracking and begging, near tears, but she seemed to have broken the trail of Merelock’s delusion. Hope bloomed warm in her. She met the other woman’s gaze, held it. Let her be jarred by the pain, Jann thought. Let her think! Let her see it in my

(but it isn’t even my)

face.

For a long moment there was no sound, and then Merelock began making a low noise in her throat. Jann leaned in, listening for words, but there was just a soft moan of breath. Jann kept her eyes on Merelock’s, trying to ignore what her senses were telling her about the woman’s features, trying to pull insight out of the air by simple concentration.

‘Jann?’ The doubling of Merelock’s voice was gone. It was a simple voice now, the voice Jann was familiar with, but it was faint and confused. ‘Jann, is that you? I can’t recognise you. What happened to us? What happened? I hurt, Jann. I hurt. I can hear the forge engines. Where’s Tokuin? Jann?’

‘We’re going up from the forge,’ Jann told her. ‘Up to the top level, where that thing is. I know we… weren’t always like this. I dream how we were before we found it. I think if we all go and find it we might understand about those people in my dreams.’

‘Up,’ said Merelock, still in that small, childlike voice. ‘We’ll go up.’ She tried to hold out her broken arm but it wouldn’t quite extend. ‘You and I. Together.’ Merelock wouldn’t release her grip on her spear, so Jann held her as best she could under the broken arm and tried to help her along. ‘We’ll walk together. You and I. Together in the dark.’ Grunting, Jann got Merelock to the end of the aisle and into a broader space where they could more comfortably walk abreast. ‘You and I, walking in the dark,’ Merelock said, ‘and not our first such journey, no,’ with an almost-chuckle that chilled Jann’s blood. The sound seemed to be picked up and echoed in the gloom around them. Jann thought she heard soft, rapid footsteps counterpointing the echoes, but who could tell any more what was happening around her and what was the ghost-pantomime in her own head?

(‘Gallardi, Klaide, fetch a pair of piston-grips,’ Merelock said. Her voice, never very powerful, was fighting against the stiff wind on the tower roof but there was still enough snap in it to cut through the arguments. ‘Tokuin knows we’ve had a find, but he has some sort of ministration to attend to below before he’ll come up and look at this thing. We’ll make a start ourselves.’

‘Ma’am, Jann thinks there’s definitely tech in there,’ said Crussman, ‘and I agree with her. Look, that long curve has the line of an engine cowl, and if you look under it you’ll see, well, I’m sure it’s machinery.’

‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Merelock said as Klaide, Gallardi and Heng came past pushing the big piston-grip pedestals on their rumbling wheels. ‘But the tech is the only thing I’m having him look at. If that stuff you think is machinery is part of the Mechanicus mysteries then we’re best served by keeping them sweet from the start, but whatever there is here that’s not machinery is legal salvage of the Filiate Guilds. There’s no lack of piety in doing things by the letter and sorting out what’s ours.’