Authors: Tim Lebbon
‘The ground is spitting at us!’ Leki said, ‘And it’s hot!’
Strange words, but then something made Bon sit up and turn around. The geyser still steamed and roared, but there was something else moving closer to them. Slick and wet, shifting like thick boiling blood, there was nothing sharp about the movement, but still he knew it could bite. His hand stole into Juda’s jacket in search of the pistol once more.
Electrical light flickered back and forth through the atmosphere, illuminating the marsh gas and the thing that had erupted from the geyser with greenish light.
‘Leki!’ Bon
whispered, but she had already seen.
‘Out of the ground,’ she said, ‘and it has teeth.’
It had a body of mud and filth, thick enough to retain form but fluid enough to be in constant movement. No eyes, unless they were also of mud, but Bon could see several slippery gashes moving across its surface that could only have been mouths. Teeth shimmered there, formed of steam; mini-geysers, perpetuating the promise of danger the main geyser had made. When the teeth dispersed to the air others replaced them. The thing moved closer, slicking across the wet ground.
Bon brought out the steam pistol and registered the irony of using it against this thing.
‘That won’t touch it,’ Leki said, but Bon asked her what other hope they had.
It closed on them, he fired, a splash of mud. Another venting of steam, more mud, even closer than before and hard enough to punch the ground and bounce them from it, a momentary freefall that seemed to continue for ever. His memory took the same plunge.
Whatever followed was ambiguous in his mind as the marsh hazed his sight, and for a long time after Bon was not entirely sure they had survived.
In the belly of the beast
, he thought, scooping mud from his ears and picking it from where it had dried on his stubble.
Still in the belly of the beast, remembering as I am slowly digested
…
And the next moment in those marshes that persisted as memory …
Deeper into the nightmare landscape, changed so much. Islands were less frequent, but they could follow the higher ground by aiming for where the moon did not reflect. Juda moaned and struggled, but Bon and Leki seemed to marshal more strength, sensing that they would find somewhere to hide soon. Juda had not told them where, or how long they needed
to run to evade the slayers. He had not told them what to do. But somewhere there was a haven, and they were close to finding it. Once inside, the slayers would pass them by, their terrible persistence confused by the mixed odours of marsh gas. Perhaps Bon would know they had passed, perhaps not. But once settled, they could wait out the night.
Maybe the ghosts would guide them. They rose like drifts of steam, glimmering with promise. Some drifted with the breeze, enclosed in clouds of gas that Bon and Leki did their best to avoid. Other moved against the wind and came closer. They did not last for long – lost to the air before Bon had a chance to really see – but those that approached close enough seemed to whisper to him. He could not hear their words or sense their intention. Leki would not meet his eye.
Juda became heavier, as if absorbing the air of this place and ingesting it. They had to put him down to rest more and more, their brief burst of strength failing.
‘They’re gathering,’ Bon said, looking around at the wraiths haunting the landscape.
‘Watching,’ Leki said. ‘I can’t go on. Not any more, not with him.’ She dropped Juda’s legs and stretched upright, hands pressed into the small of her back.
‘So we leave him?’ Bon asked. He did not mean it, and hoped that Leki would not agree.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No …’
‘Leki?’
She looked at him, and her eyes seemed distant.
‘Leki?’
‘I think we should ask them for help.’
‘Them?’ He nodded at the strange figures, some fading and manifesting again, others drifting. They exuded no menace.
‘I think they were all someone,’ Leki said, and she started down the
gentle slope. They had paused on an island of dryness in a sea of marshy land, and it took Leki only a dozen steps until her boots sank into the ground. Dirty water seeped around her feet, and when she knelt her boots squelched in the muck.
‘Take a breath, Bon,’ Leki said. ‘We’re looking for somewhere we might never find on our own.’
Leki leaned forward and pressed both hands down into the mud.
Reading the water
, Bon thought, and he knelt down beside Juda to watch. Juda was stirring again, struggling feebly against his bonds and humming behind the temporary gag. He had brought them here, and then abandoned them to weather his own nightmares.
Leki remained motionless for some time, head dipped down and hair hanging around her face. Some of the wraiths faded away, and others drifted off into a darkness the moon did not touch. But some remained, seemingly more solid than before. Bon thought that he could make out features – a mouth here, deep, impenetrable eyes there. It was as if they were remembering themselves, and he suspected it was Leki, the amphy, inspiring those memories.
As Leki read the waters, Bon caught his breath.
‘A mile to the north,’ Leki said at last.
They went that way, and all the time those wraiths seemed to merge from the darkness and the mists to follow them. Juda moaned, Bon’s shoulders ached. Leki remained silent, answering nothing, and it was only as they neared a forest of huge trees that she revealed what else she had heard.
‘The slayers are here,’ she said. ‘Searching the marshes. Their senses harried by the environment. Juda might have been right – if we can hide in here away from them, they might just miss us.’
Leki led
them to a massive tree that had rotted from the inside, forming a hollow tree cave in which they might find protection.
‘They’ll smell us around the tree’s base,’ Bon said. He was panting now, sweating, exhausted from carrying Juda so far. He so wanted this to be the place where they would hide, but he could not avoid his doubts.
‘Maybe,’ Leki said. ‘But Bon. Do we have anywhere else to go?’
So they entered the hollowed tree, climbing a little so that they were above ground level, inside the trunk that might have been five thousand years old and which perhaps had housed a hundred refugees fleeing a hundred different dangers. Things grew in there, plump, damp fungi that whistled as they pushed past. Insects and other creatures scuttled in the darkness. But Bon found that he was too tired to be afraid, or to care.
They perched halfway up the inside of the hollowed trunk, settling within creases of wood and wedging Juda tight onto a ledge. Leki found a rent where an old branch had fallen away, and she watched outside. Bon was so tired.
‘What did you find?’ he asked, nodding at Juda. They’d strapped his pack to his stomach, and one hand seemed to rest protectively on the canvas.
‘Things he shouldn’t have,’ Leki said.
‘Such as?’
She did not reply for a while. She watched outside, and Bon felt the tension in the silence as she strove for the right words.
‘I think he might be a Wrench Arc,’ she said. ‘Or close enough that distinctions barely matter.’
Wrench Arc
, Bon thought. Juda was a danger, perhaps a murderer. Yet he had hinted that he could lead them to Venden.
Bon was so
tired. He could hear, taste and smell alien things. Venden smiled in his memories, the joy of a young child untouched by the concerns that came with age.
It grew no darker, and yet Bon Ugane slept.
‘Bon!’
The first thing he noticed was the smell. Then he felt something pressed over his face, bunched beneath his nose, and Bon snapped awake. He opened his eyes to complete darkness – even the moonlight that had filtered into the ancient tree was absent. He tried to breathe in but was hampered by the thing pressed there. A cloth, bunched and pushed hard against his nostrils. Odours from it played with his senses.
‘Bon! Keep quiet.’ That was Leki. Bon pawed at his face and felt a hand there, and then another hand grasped his and entwined fingers, squeezing softly, comfortingly.
Bon inhaled slower, and found that he could breathe through the cloth.
‘Keep it tight to your nose and mouth,’ she whispered into his ear. ‘Sit up slowly. Lean into me. Look.’
Bon did everything she had told him. Leki was warm, and when he put his arm around her she did not pull away. She touched the tree beside the crack in the trunk to show him where to look, and then her own arm went around him. She, too, held a cloth to her nose with her other hand. She had gathered the scents of marsh, tree and filthy water; added camouflage to the tadcat liver oil.
‘This is when we see,’ she said, and she was talking about Juda. This was when they saw whether he was telling them the truth, or not.
The slayers were outside. They crossed the marshy landscape, moving slowly and without deliberation. Their faces were upturned, and Bon could see the glimmer of moonlight on mucus
spread across their mouths and chins. They were too far away to hear, but he knew that the hunters were sniffing for them, and breathing in only the scents of the gas marshes.
The female slayer was closest. She moved with a grace that belied her bulky form, spiked with the points and blades of packed weapons, stocky legs sinking into the marshy ground. She was covered in mud, from her toes to the top of her head. She must have been wading straight across the marshes rather than going for higher ground, and Bon was not sure what this meant. It was either foolishness, or a need to move faster in a straight line. And they could not assume that the slayers were fools.
The male slayer moved further across the landscape. He shifted like the land itself, shrugging and moving.
How can we ever hope to escape them? Bon
thought, and a chill hopelessness passed through him.
Juda moaned and struggled, immersed in his nightmares, and for a moment Bon expected the slayers’ heads to turn their way. The hunters might not be able to smell them, but they would surely hear.
But there were other noises outside that drowned Juda’s unconscious struggles. Unseen creatures howled somewhere in the far distance. A deep, almost sub-audible rumbling – great ice-lakes changing position below them, so Leki claimed. And close by a geyser hissed, the explosive emission followed by the heavy impacts of wet mud and …
… and perhaps other things.
Those mud-wolves will take them
, Bon thought. He watched the darkness for shadows that did not belong, wishing them nearer, urging the shapes to take form and fall upon the slayers. Nothing came. The hunters moved off to the north, heads tilted as they sniffed at the tainted air. They were not being
quiet about their movement. There was no subtlety there.
Leki sighed and relaxed into him, leaning her full weight upon him. He smelled her breath in the darkness as she leaned close, and it was precious. He kissed her. It was a kiss of peace, not passion, and they both took comfort from it. Their mutual hug was one of safety, not lust.
Juda seemed to calm, and Bon and Leki remained close together for the rest of that night.
Bon slept no more. Every time he closed his eyes he saw Venden running across the swampland of his memory, phantom shadows chasing him away.
Venden
Ugane rode through the afternoon, drawn by Kellis Faults’s call. He could feel it tugging at the heart of him, as the remnant pushed from afar. The sense of being a pawn troubled him little. Intellectually he knew that he was not his own man, but that had changed little since he was a small child. He had always been waiting for this.
The shire rode strong and fast. Venden did not push it too hard, but he also did not hold back. There were miles to cover, and at this rate he could ride for the rest of the day and through the night, and reach his objective by morning. Walking, it would take him days.
On this final quest of discovery and retrieval he wanted to be away from the remnant for as little time as possible. He knew that, upon his return, something was going to change.
Perhaps everything.
Yet he relished the journey, enjoying the feel of the powerful beast beneath him, the breeze in his hair, the movement, the sense of time passing and progress being made. He had not ridden a shire since childhood, and he soon realised it was
one of the few things he missed from his time back on Alderia. The beast was tireless, and several times Venden urged it into a sprint, laughing in delight as he bent down across its back, hands tangled in its flowing mane, hanging on for dear life. If he fell he might be badly injured, and deep down he knew that he was taking a foolish risk. But the occasion overcame him. He had been in danger many times since coming to Skythe, but this was a danger whose parameters he knew. He felt in control of this headlong rush.
Following the course of a wide, slow-moving river back towards its source, Venden knew that he would come eventually to Kellis Faults, the remains of Skythe’s capital city. And as afternoon turned into evening and the sun smudged across the western horizon, the landscape he was used to began to change. Sparse clumps of trees spotting slopes and valleys became denser, deeper woodland. The land became flatter and yet more mysterious, and as darkness fell Venden found himself negotiating a thickly forested landscape the likes of which he had not seen on Skythe before.
Even in the shadows, he could understand how unsettled this scenery was. Many of the trees were squat and deformed, unsure of which way to grow, as if they could not find the sun. Their limbs were half grown and ended in gnarled knots. Spindly bracken grew across the forest floor, and great swathes of it was browned with poor growth, crackling underfoot. It would die and fade back into the ground, and whatever descendants it might have seeded would possess the same faults.
The woodland slowed the shire, but still he rode through the night. He paused only when his bodily rhythms demanded it, and to eat food he’d brought with him. Several times the beast slowed and edged closer to the river to drink. Venden took the opportunity to rest. Clasping on tightly as he ran the animal
was hard work, and as it drank its fill he relaxed on its back and looked out over the river.