Alloria shrugged, her fear a tangible thing, and Anu realised with great sadness that she had lost Alloria. Alloria had seen the beast raging in Anu’s soul; it had shocked her to the core.
“You are still vachine,” said Alloria, and turned her back on Anu, snuggling under a heavy blanket.
Anu moved back to the upper deck, and checked the bindings on Vashell. With his vachine claws, he would have easily escaped; but now, neutered as he was, a machine vampire gelding, he could do little harm.
“You should let me go,” said Vashell, looking into Anu’s eyes.
“No.”
“I will tell you the way. Draw you a map…in my own blood.” He laughed, and Anu met his gaze. “I do love you, Anu. You know that?”
“You would kill me! You saw me disgraced. You revelled in your power and violent abuse.”
“I have many faults,” said Vashell. Then he gestured to his face, and chuckled again. “You have taught me humility.” His voice grew more serious, emerging as a low growl. “But I do love you. I will always love you. Until the day I die. Until the day you kill me. You thought, back in Silva Valley, I was full of arrogance and hatred and superiority. You were right. I was despicable, and I understand why you spurned my offers of marriage; it wasn’t just your fear at being different, Anu, it was deeper, in your soul, under lock and key.” He sighed, and looked up at the heavy, cloud-filled sky. More snow began to tumble, and it drifted like ash. “We are destined, you and I. To live in a world of mixed love and hate, each strand intertwining around our hearts, our cores.”
He gazed at Anu, eyes filled with tears.
“I will still kill you,” said Anu, with tombstone voice.
“Good! I would not have it any other way. Go to sleep now. I will try nothing, do nothing. Trust me. After all…you took away my claws, you took away my fangs. Don’t you realise? I am like you, Anu. I am neutered. I am an outcast. You turned me into yourself. I can never go back.”
Anu walked down to her cabin, a narrow affair with nothing more than a bunk and brass walls. She locked
the door, and realised with horror that Vashell was right. By removing his vachine tools, she had destroyed his rank, his standing, his nobility. She had deformed him from a beautiful vachine. There would be no repair by the Engineers; only terminal condemnation for his very great weakness.
So where would he go? What would he do?
No. Anu had attached Vashell to herself, to her mission, with chains much stronger than love. She had condemned him with a force of exile; an extradition of country, but more importantly, also of race.
The morning was bright and crisp, and snow had fallen lightly during the night, covering the brass barge with a light peppering of white. Vashell uncurled from slumber as Anu crept up the steps, and he stared at her with a bleak smile. Already, his face was healing, skin growing back over his destroyed features; but he would never look the same again. Despite his advanced vachine healing powers, he would be savagely scarred. Anu had, effectively, taken away his handsomeness. Removed his nobility.
Within a few minutes the brass barge was nosing up river, and for the course of the day they came upon more and more tributaries where a decision had to be made on which path to follow. Unfalteringly, Vashell would point, sometimes with a smart comment, other times in brooding silence as his moods swung from savage brutality to almost joyous abandon, as if high on a natural heady cocktail, where he would joke about his ruined features, and mock Anu, saying she
was now the only girl for him, and they could breed twisted canker babies together.
As night fell, Anu sat on the deck for a while, huddled in a cloak. Vashell revelled in the cold. Alloria, who had been brooding and silent for the day, returned to her small brass room and huddled under blankets, crying softly to herself. Anu attempted to comfort her, but Alloria had taken to ignoring the young vachine.
“Tell me about Nonterrazake,” said Anu.
“No.”
“Tell me!”
“No!” He laughed. “There are some secrets a man must keep. Some dark truths he must hold to his heart, like spirals of soul; I could tell you, but it would melt your sweet little mind, curl the edges of your heart into blackened wisps of hatred, burn your soul with an eternity hell-fire.”
Anu shrugged. “Will the Harvesters really come?”
“Yes.” Vashell’s tone turned serious. “You should not have done what you did; you have angered the Harvesters beyond reprise. They will never, ever, stop the hunt.”
“Then I will kill them!” Anu snapped, annoyed at Vashell’s negativity.
Vashell shrugged. “When they send five? Ten? A hundred?”
“There are that many?”
“You do not understand what they are,” he said, voice gentle.
“Well, they will have to catch me, first,” snapped Anu, eyes narrowed.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Vashell, scratching at his wounded face and the itching, repairing skin.
“Meaning?”
“You travel to Nonterrazake. For your father. Well, that is their homeland. It is the Harvesters who hold Kradek-ka.”
Anu sat in stunned silence, unable to speak, unable to think. She had assumed they were fleeing the Harvesters. Now, it seemed, to rescue her father she would have to travel into the belly of the beast.
She gazed up at the stars. They twinkled, impossibly distant. And for a long time, Anu felt her soul melt, felt all hope vanish, and realised that her strength had gone.
In despondency, she went below deck for an endless, troubled, twisting sleep.
Anu slept late, and Alloria awoke her.
“He’s gone.”
“What? Who?”
“Vashell. The man whose face you removed with your claws.”
Groggy, and feeling as if she’d been drugged, Anu stumbled on deck and stared hopelessly at the place where Vashell had been tied. His bonds lay, broken on the deck. He was nowhere to be seen.
Anu ran to the barge’s rail. “Vashell!” she shouted. “Vashell!” Her words echoed out across mountain stone, and bounced back wreathed in early morning mist. There came no reply.
“What do we do now?” asked Alloria, softly.
“We continue without him.”
For the morning they travelled, clockwork engine humming, up the ice-filled river. Deep into the maze of the Black Pike Mountains they navigated, were
absorbed,
and Anu realised that there was no life this far in. No animals, no birds; nothing. It was desolate, barren, as bleak as another world. Even the vegetation was dreary, white and pale green, grey and black. There were few, or no trees, the heady rich evergreens had vanished leagues behind. Only tufted grass remained, mostly ensnared by snow and ice. And yet the mountains…spoke to Anu. Rock-falls boomed. Ice cracked. Rock walls shifted. Boulders fell, crackling with menace to be swallowed by the Silva River. High up, occasionally, out of sight, they heard the terrifying roar of avalanche.
With every sound, the Black Pike Mountains screamed their dominance.
After a short break for a lunch of dried meat from the brass barge’s hold, they continued, until Alloria, who was leaning at the craft’s prow allowing breeze to stream through her hair, gasped.
“What is it?”
“There! That narrow river. To the left. Follow it!”
“What did you see?”
“Just follow it! Maybe I am going insane.”
Anu nudged the brass barge up the narrow river, and they travelled for maybe a quarter of a league; the water grew deep, channelled between two towering four thousand feet walls of sheer black granite, polished and gleaming with ice, and they emerged into…
Into a lush, green clearing.
The water ended in a circular flat pool, and beyond the water’s edge stood a proliferation of trees, plants and flowers. Colours and perfumes raged through the clearing, and Anu brought the barge to a halt, bumping against a natural sloped jetty of rock.
Alloria jumped out onto the jetty, and stood with hands on hips, smiling. The sun was shining, beaming down, warming her face, and she turned back to Anu and laughed. “What is this place?”
Anu climbed from the boat, wary, aware that when on the boat she had some small sanctuary from the Harvesters. She shook her head. “I do not know.”
“Vashell talked of such a place,” said Alloria.
“He did?”
“Yes, he said it led to…the Vrekken? Whatever that is. He said there would be green trees and flowers; and there would be a tunnel. Follow the tunnel, and the foolish traveller would find the Vrekken.”
Anu turned, and her eyes narrowed. In the far wall there indeed was a tunnel opening. It was too perfect, so obviously man-made as opposed to a natural occurrence. This made Anu even more suspicious.
“Did he say anything else?”
“No. Look! Fruit!” Alloria ran to a tree and pulled down an apple. She took a bite, and laughed through juice. “It’s wonderful! Fresh and clean. I can’t believe this little…garden exists amongst the mountains. And can you smell the flowers?”
“I can.”
Alloria tossed Anu an apple, which she caught and bit. Juice ran down her chin, and she felt her mood lighten a little. Alloria was right; this place, with the
winter sun shining down between towering walls of rock, was a serious uplift to the soul.
“We cannot stay. We must stock up with supplies. We must continue.”
Alloria sighed, and waded through flowers to look deep into Anu’s eyes. “What are you searching for, Anu?”
“My father. You know this.”
“Truly? And to what end?”
Anu opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. What she wanted more than anything was to be accepted in the Silva Valley; to be accepted as pure vachine. But that had gone, now. Denied her from an early age by the very same father she sought to save; but he’d had his reasons, hadn’t he? For forcing her to become outcast? And, she realised suddenly, what she wanted more than anything was for Kradek-ka, the great inventor, to make her whole again. To put right that which he had twisted. But it was too late for that. Her chance had gone.
“I would seek acceptance,” she said, finally.
Alloria nodded, and gazed off through the trees. Birds sang in the distance. It was an uplifting sound. “Vashell said there was a path, here; a path that leads south, away, out from the embrace of the Black Pike Mountains.”
Anu stared at her. She licked her lips. “You wish to leave?”
“Yes. I would return to my husband. I would return to my children. You understand this, surely?”
Anu sighed. “Yes. I understand you. But it will be a harsh and terrible journey. I believe the paths are…treacherous.”
Alloria nodded. “I would suffer anything to see my family again.”
“Then go. With my blessing.”
“You could come with me,” said Alloria. “I heard what Vashell said; about this place, this Nonterrazake. And the Harvesters who reside there. You don’t even know if your father still lives! It is insanity to go on.”
“You listen well,” said Anu, a little stiffly. “No. I will travel there. If nothing else, I will discover the truth.”
Queen Alloria moved forward, and gazed into Anu’s eyes. “I know I have been…distant.” She licked her lips. “but…thank you, for saving me, from the soldiers. I find it hard to comprehend your ways, but hopefully, one day, if you arrive at my lands in Falanor, I will be able to extend you some form of courtesy; some help.” She paused, awkward, not really sure what she wanted to say, her mind awash with conflicting thoughts.
Anu smiled, leant forward and hugged Alloria.
“It will be as you say.”
Anu stepped back onto the Engineer’s Barge, the scents of rich flowers in her nostrils, in her golden curls, and she nosed the boat away from this inner sanctum, this temporary Eden, and towards the ominous cave which seemed to beckon her with a tiny, sibilant whisper.
Come to me, the cave seemed to say.
Come to the Vrekken.
The brass barge glided across still waters, and entered the darkness of the tunnel.
Within seconds, Anu was swallowed. Was gone.
For hours the brass barge eased through blackness. Occasionally, it would bump against jagged rock walls, and Anukis found herself praying. She did not want to drown. Even worse, she did not want to drown in a tomb-world beneath the Black Pike Mountains!
The wind whistled eerily down tunnels, and it was with a start Anu realised she was in a maze. The tenebrosity obscured the nature of the labyrinth, and it only came with time, with context, as Anu realised she was being drawn along by powerful currents, and no longer the hum of the clockwork engine. For a while she set the engine to full power, heard it clonking, gears stepping, straining against the pull. Then she realised it was futile; whatever pulled the brass barge seemed almost sentient, and she would simply burn out the engine if she continued.
Anu cut the power, and sat in eerie silence made more deafening by the stillness of the barge. She realised, then, she had grown used to the sound of the clockwork engine; it had been a comfort, like mother’s heartbeat in the womb.
Now, only the wind sang her to sleep.
Minutes passed into hours passed into days, and Anu lost all concept of time. She slept when she was tired, and ate what meagre rations remained in the hold of the barge, mainly hard bread, salted fish and a little dried pork. Or at least, animal flesh of some kind.
Eventually, veins of crystal ran through the black rock over Anu’s head; faintly at first, no more than occasional threads, strands of orange and green to break up the monotony of the terminal black. Then the threads grew more proliferous and thicker in
banding, and it provided an eerie, underground light of sorts. Anu could make out the backs of her hands, and a vague outline of the barge. That was all.
The noise came after…she did not know. It could have been two days, could have been five. It was a blur, a blur of time, of memory, of identity. The noise began as a tiny crackling sound, which had Anu scampering down to the engine to see if there was a fault. But the clockwork engine was dead; killed by her own pretty, vachine-clawed hands.
Then, after hours, the noise increased and Anu realised it was the sound of gushing water, like that of a waterfall, or fast rapids over rocks. It echoed through the tunnels, strange acoustics summoned and distributed by the very nature of the environment.