The Harvest Tide Project (7 page)

For their rescue operation, he and his sister had taken steps to blend in the shadows. His skin was a dull grey-green colour and had a mottled pattern, both of which helped to break up his shape in the darkness.

‘Keep them away!' Groach moaned.

‘Oh, that poor little girl.' Hilspeth was still begging the
forgiveness
of Lorkrin's sister.

‘They're coming to get me!' Groach cried.

‘Well, yeah. We are …' Lorkrin grimaced as he managed to turn his finger in the stiff lock. The padlock clicked open. He let out a grunt of satisfaction and then another, more painful one as he was lifted up by his hair from behind.

‘A little pup, trying to break the dogs free,' said Wulms, raising the boy up to get a look at his face. Lorkrin thrashed and kicked, but was held fast. Other soldiers ran towards the wagon, some of them climbing onto the driver's cab to get hold of the girl. Seeing the boy held up like a hen for the slaughter, Groach knew that whatever else this young whelp was, he was just a boy. He would be severely punished for defying the soldiers and no child deserved that. From the front of the cage, he charged towards the back, hitting the unlocked door with one foot and slamming it into the
shoulder of the Noranian. It struck with enough force to knock the big man over, causing him to let go of the boy.

Lorkrin was free, but surrounded on all sides by
Noranians
many times his size. He would not get far by trying to break out of the circle. He dived under the gaol wagon and scampered along its length, bursting out from under the front to go straight under the next one in the circle. Soldiers struggled to reach under and catch hold of him, but he was quick and their bulky armour prevented them from getting too far in.

Above him, Taya was still sneezing, tears pouring from her eyes. She knew she had to get away. It had all gone wrong. Wiping her eyes, she saw a shape climbing onto the top of the wagon. She turned the other way and ran across the wooden grid, over the heads of the prisoners. She was not going to make the jump to the next vehicle, but a helmet-clad head appeared over the edge at the last second and she stepped onto it and over the gap. She was unaware that beneath the circle of carriages, her brother was going in the opposite direction. This next roof was flat boards. Under these, something loud and savage shrieked up at her, infected by the excitement. Feral voices turned her blood cold. Whatever creatures were in this wagon, she hoped they stayed there. Hate and violence screamed from inside.

Her sneezing was easing off. The cool night air cleared her eyes, and she was getting her breath back. She ran across the roof and dropped onto the engine cowling of the next
vehicle
, this one a steam-powered catapult. The bonnet was steel, barrel-shaped with four small chimneys along the top. She felt heat under her feet; the fires were still smouldering in the furnace. Guards had caught up with her on the ground
on both sides. She stepped onto the first chimney and out of reach of two who had followed her onto the roof. The girl hopped to the second one, head swivelling from side to side to find an escape route. But she was surrounded. There was only the roof of the driver's cab ahead of her. She skipped across the last two pipes and climbed up onto the arching roof. The soldiers had anticipated her and were climbing onto the roof ahead of her. Taya was cut off.

Lorkrin ducked under an axle, pushed past a flailing hand on one side and dodged a spear thrust at him from the other. He could see large booted feet on both sides, but the
soldiers
were having trouble seeing him. They were holding lanterns under the vehicles to try to light the blackness. With the soldiers getting in each others' way, he had managed to stay out of their grasp. But as long as he stayed under the wagons, he was going to keep going round in circles. He could not escape the guards for long.

In the gaol wagon, Groach was trying to get the other
prisoners
to join him in an escape. The turmoil caused by the two children had resulted in the door being left unlocked. Wulms had run off after the boy he had dropped and
everyone
seemed to have forgotten their captives. Surprisingly, Groach was having some difficulty in persuading anyone else to come along.

‘… but we can escape! The door's open! Come on – what are you waiting for?'

‘You go. I'm staying right here,' one man replied.

‘Me too. I'm fine where I am,' said another.

‘Safer in here than out there,' muttered a third.

‘I don't understand,' Groach whined, perplexed. ‘You've all been taken from your homes against your will. These
people mean you nothing but harm. We can break out of here and make a run for it. Why won't you try?'

He did not want to admit that he was afraid to try it alone, but he found their attitude bewildering.

Lorkrin came to a space between two of the vehicles. There were sacks and a couple of metal barrels on the ground in front of him. The guards had lost sight of him for the moment. He crouched in the shadows, glad of the rest. He poked at the sacks by his side, grain or corn or
something
. The barrels were about half his height, but wider than the wooden ones he was used to. He wondered what was in them. Unscrewing a cap, he put his nose to it and took a sniff. Bule oil – the refined stuff used for fuelling engines. In a moment of mischievous glee, he tipped it over on its side. It gurgled out and under the sacks and around them to the carriage.

A guard saw it fall and rushed over, holding a lantern. He stuck it in through the gap and Lorkrin shouted and kicked out, knocking the lamp against the metal grill of the wagon, smashing the glass. The burning fuel spewed out and fell upon the oil-soaked grass. Lorkrin yelped. The flames were creeping under him. They reached out for the still gushing barrel. Lorkrin and the soldier bolted in different directions in time to escape the explosion. The boy was thrown to the ground by the force of it. He lifted his head and could hear a fast, popping sound in his ears. At first he thought he had damaged his hearing, but then he saw white fluffy tufts springing from the flames.

That's popcorn, he observed, dizzily.

The soldiers were rushing about, trying to put out the fire. He was lying outside the circle, a short run from the nearby
trees. He got up and started running towards them.

Taya was trapped. There were guards on all sides. While her body froze, her mind raced. She had to think of
something
, fast. Nothing came to her, so she charged at the three soldiers on the roof, diving between the legs of the first,
rolling
away from the second and finding her feet in time to leap to the neighbouring wagon before the third could snatch at her. A quick sprint across that roof and she was launching herself over the next gap when it exploded.

A wave of heat lifted her up and caused her to miss the edge of the wagon's roof, but dropped her neatly into the arms of a soldier. Though grateful for the soft landing, she poked him in the eye and he let go. She slipped away into the darkness as chaos took hold of the camp.

‘Hilspeth? What about you?' Groach did not know what was going on out there, but it seemed a perfect diversion for an escape.

‘I won't, thanks. You don't understand, Panch. These men have all been taken from their homes, so the soldiers know just where to find them again if they escape, but it's not just that …'

‘That's enough games!' the Convoy Commander
bellowed
. ‘Release the skacks and be done with it!'

Hilspeth leaned past Groach, closed the door to the cage and snapped the padlock shut. He gaped at her and tried the door as if he could not believe what she had done. She took his hand in hers:

‘Believe me, Panch. It's for the best.'

Forward-Batterer Wulms gave the soldiers some time to apply skack-repellent ointment to the bare areas of their skin, before taking a short, stout oak staff in one hand and
unlocking the door of their van. The pure hate Taya had sensed, only minutes before, hissed and growled from within. Creatures, the like of which should only appear in nightmares, struggled with each other to get out. Wulms beat them back with the stick, screaming hysterically at them in a beast-like tongue.

Skacks were predators about the size and weight of an adult man, but there the resemblance ended. Native to Guthoque, an area of Noran infamous for its dry, rocky, almost lifeless landscape, they had evolved to survive by being more savage than any other form of life. The area's only feature of interest was its range of volcanoes, which regularly wiped out most of the animal life in their vicinity. From this unforgiving environment was born the skack. They were as quick and agile as cats, more intelligent than dogs and hardier than mountain goats. Their skin was purple and grey to camouflage them against the volcanic rock. Instead of eyes, useless in the poisonous gases of Guthoque, they had deeply ridged foreheads that could sense vibrations in the air, enabling them to find and identify their prey in daylight, fog or absolute darkness with equal ease. Short, blunt snouts carried heavy jaws, poisonous fangs and nostrils that could track better than a bloodhound.

A skack's legs were short, and had the extended shins of an animal born to run at speed. It had big, ropey arms at the ends of each of which hung a single, serrated claw, nearly the length of its shin. This would be tucked up while
running
, but could be unfolded for digging, climbing, or tearing its victims limb from limb.

The Noranian nobles had captured and bred these
creatures
for hunting, only to find that even the best-trained
skacks ate everything they caught, leaving little to hang on a wall as a trophy. The breeding of the animals had been handed onto the army.

Wulms loved his skacks. He loved their savagery; he loved the way the soldiers were scared of them (and therefore, of him) and he loved their simple language, having only about sixty words, most of which referred to prey, and how to catch and kill it. He batted them back, slamming his staff down on any head that poked though the doorway, and threw in a tuft of hair that he had pulled from the Myunan boy's head. There was a moment's silence as the skacks sniffed this. Then Wulms stepped out of their way. The vehicle bounced on its suspension as each creature leapt from it, bounded over the grass and disappeared off into the night towards the forest.

5 T
HE
N
ATIVES OF
G
UTHOQUE

Lorkrin ran as he had never run before, weaving between tree trunks and springing over brambles and ferns. He knew that this time, he and Taya had got themselves into a
predicament
that might well be the end of them. For the first time in his life, Lorkrin wondered if he was going to die. He did not know where his sister was, and he was terrified that she might already have been caught. His legs pumped hard and his heart pumped harder. His breath was coming in gasps, and he could just hear sounds of pursuit over the beat of his pulse in his ears. There were high screeches coming from the things that were chasing him, things he knew were not soldiers. At least, not normal ones. He had heard of skacks, but had never seen one. They were the kind of thing that boys talked excitedly about – like any other monster. The thought of them did not excite him now.

He had some idea where he was going. He and Taya had come this way when they had sneaked up on the camp. The young shape-shifter began slunching to soften up his arms, kneading flesh down towards his hands. There was no time for proper amorphing, but he would need every advantage
he could get. Massaging his now plump hands flat, he squeezed the extra meat into each of his fingers and pulled on them to lengthen them. He now had fingers nearly twice as long as his natural ones; it was the best he could do. It had slowed down his running and was making him tire faster.

He broke out into a clearing, lit by a bright moon in a
suddenly
cloudless sky. Off to his right, a powerful,
hunchbacked
animal emerged from the tree-line. It scanned the clearing, picked him out, and bolted after him. Lorkrin whimpered despite himself. The thing was unbelievably fast. It would be on him in no time.

Ahead of him, he could see where the ground came to an end and, beyond it, the tops of trees. With his short legs
lifting
high to clear the long grass, he made for the cliff edge. He was breathing in sobs, and his heart felt like it was going to burst from his chest. Behind him, he could hear the pounding feet closing in on him. He was not going to make it. It was right at his heels. He was not going to make it …

Lorkrin hurled himself off the edge, his arms and legs
flailing
in empty space. He fell, grabbed at a tree branch, missed it, grabbed at another, caught it, slipped and then held on to the very end of it with his long, strong fingers. His weight swung him in and the thin trunk curved but did not break. Above him, the skack launched itself off the brink, but its cruel claws were badly suited to clinging to the light limbs of treetops. It scrabbled at the foliage of a neighbouring tree, grasped nothing and tumbled down through the branches, hitting the ground below with a crunch. Lorkrin worked his way in to the trunk of his tree and clung to it, trembling.

Taya knew her brother had escaped. She could hear him somewhere ahead of her. She could also hear the
commotion
in the woods behind her. There was no chance she would outrun them. These were not soldiers giving chase; they were something else and they were very, very fast. Inhuman screeches pierced the night air, and snarls and panting were growing louder all the time. If she could have caught her own breath, she would have been crying. They were in terrible trouble. She risked a glance behind, but could see nothing in the darkness cast under the trees in the moonlight. This frightened her even more. Whatever was back there was not having any difficulty tracking her in this gloom. If she was going to escape, she needed a faster form than that of a little girl.

Up ahead, she saw the bright glow of a clearing and she turned away from it. She would never make it across that open space. Her only chance was to keep dodging through the shadows of the trees. She took another look back and tripped, falling headlong into the undergrowth. Instinctively, she squinted back to see what she had fallen over. It was a large burrow. A badger or something even bigger lived down there. She was getting to her feet when she changed her mind and dived down it. Whatever was down here could not be worse than those things that were closing in on her. The tunnel was a tight fit, but she was in no position to complain.

The three skacks slowed their pace when their quarry
suddenly
disappeared. With their noses to the ground, they
followed
the scent. It was a slightly different smell from the one they had been given by their master, but it was close enough. They found a hole where the spoor was still strong.
None of them could fit down it, but that would not be a problem for long. They started digging, tearing up chunks of earth with their claws. They could sense the prey beneath. They would have it soon, very soon.

Taya dragged herself further down the burrow and found it widened out as she got deeper. Soon, she was able to sit up. There was even soft grass on the floor. This was a
molebear’s
tunnel. The smell was unmistakable. She knew a bit about these animals. Their burrows were labyrinths.
Gardeners
hated them because they could dig out one part of the tunnel system, and find that it stretched for hundreds of strides in any direction. If you had a mole-bear beneath your garden, you would find it hard to get rid of and they could eat huge amounts of vegetables. Above and behind her, she could hear the sound of digging. Beyond where she sat, the tunnel grew too narrow for her. She could dig at it, make it wider, but not fast enough. She snuffled, feeling panic rise. With a determined sniff, she wiped her nose with her sleeve and smoothed her hair back. Taya Archisan was not the
panicking
type. She tried to ignore the way the burrow seemed to be crushing in on her, robbing her of air. Opening her backpack by feel, she took out her tools and began to reshape her legs, fingers working nimbly even without light to see by. When she had done her legs, she started her head and shoulders. The digging drew closer.

The skacks were getting feverish in their excitement. They were almost upon their prey. They had uncovered a long length of tunnel and had discovered a wider section. The tree roots were slowing them down, but they could sense their prey moving under them, and their mouths were watering at the prospect.

When they had dug further and still had not found her, they began to get agitated. The tunnel had narrowed again and its roof was thick with roots. The quarry had gone
further
in, even though they knew she was too big for this part of the burrow. They stopped digging and argued in a crude, guttural language. One stayed by the mouth of the hole. The other two split up and searched the ground for the spoor. Few animals were capable of tracking a creature once it went underground, but the skack was one of those exceptions.

If Taya had been standing up, she would have been taller than any adult she knew. Her arms were much shorter than usual and her legs had become a flexible part of her
snake-like
body, with her feet doing all the work at the back. Her neck was now holding her head up from the back of her skull so that she did not have to keep lifting it up to see where she was going. Thin strands of muscle crefted into whiskers told her what her eyes did not. In this long, thin, short-legged shape, she was able to move quite fast through the tunnels. She had left the digging sounds behind and was, she thought, putting as much distance between herself and her hunters as possible. It was hard to tell in the absolute darkness underground and in the cave-like hollows that twisted and turned with no obvious direction. She still had not met the creature that had dug this maze. She was not sure what she would do if she ran into it.

Footsteps overhead caused her to freeze. Could that be the Noranian creatures (she was still not sure she believed in skacks)? Surely they could not still be following her? How could they track her? Taya stayed quite still. This part of the burrow might be shallow enough for someone to hear her
moving about, if they were close enough. The footsteps were very close. She could feel the vibrations through her feet and in her side where she was pressed against the wall. Suddenly she felt trapped again. The walls were too close; she was being smothered in this blackness. The footsteps were moving away. Shutting her eyes, Taya imagined herself in a wide open field. She pretended she could feel the breeze on her face and grass underfoot. Wondering where Lorkrin had got to, if he had made it away, she felt tears welling up in her eyes. Her whiskers twitched. Air moved in the tunnel; something was coming towards her. It was the burrow’s owner. But her thoughts of that were quickly quashed as the footsteps came thumping back. The skacks too had heard the animal moving. There was an impact, then another and blue moonlight broke through the earth between her and the mole-bear. She backed off, but the mole-bear did not. Taya saw it in the shower of light, a stocky, silk-furred animal with powerful forepaws lined with thick curled claws. The skack – she was sure now what it was – drove both claws into the ground and pulled a sod of earth away. It dug in again, tearing open a hole big enough to get its head and shoulders in. And there it made a mistake.

As soon as it stuck its head in, the mole-bear took hold with its large forepaws and pulled hard. It was on its own territory down here; it knew how to take advantage of it. The skack, unable to get its head out, was being dragged into a space with no room to fight. The smaller creature was not nearly as strong, but it was firmly wedged in and had a tight grip. The skack screeched at a pitch high enough to hurt Taya’s ears. She crouched, transfixed by the struggle. The mole-bear growled, backed further in, and the skack was
now halfway into the burrow. The light was almost
completely
blocked out. From what she could hear, the
tunnelling
creature had started using its teeth and claws on the bigger beast. She worked her way backwards until she came to a junction and took another route.

Some time later, she saw a patch of light ahead and made carefully for it. It was a hole that came out under a slab of rock; a shallow stream ran nearby. Taya looked carefully around, then slid slowly out and into the stream. She waded down through the cold water until she thought she had hidden her scent enough, then grabbed an overhanging branch and hauled herself up into the foliage. There, she slunched back to her normal shape, and climbed as high as she could while still hidden from view. By jamming herself into a fork in the trunk, she made herself secure. Drained by her ordeal, she shivered, wishing she and Lorkrin could be safe at home in their warm lodge with their folks. The thought that Lorkrin might have been caught by those beasts was unbearable and she turned her face into the tree trunk and closed her eyes, trying not to think of what could have befallen her brother. Uncle Emos would still be hunting them, and she fell asleep hoping he would find them.

Groach woke to the noise of the soldiers breaking camp. They were packing equipment and weapons away, and
falling
into marching formation. Everything smelled of smoke and soot and oil from the fire of the night before. The driver had cranked up his engine and was waiting for his turn to pull into the column of vehicles. Groach yawned and stretched, shifting uncomfortably on the hard board floor of
the cage. He was cold and damp from dew. They had not been given blankets for the night. He shivered in the chill morning air. Hilspeth, still drowsy, rolled against his side and snuggled up for warmth. He was about to point out that he wanted to stand up and move around, but he did not. Let her get a bit warmer first, he decided.