Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (17 page)

James exhaled as Beth disappeared, and fixed his gaze on Alexander. He thought he caught an unspoken apology, but he couldn’t be sure. It might have been wishful thinking. Because, in truth, he knew that if the mission had called for it, Alexander would have watched Malverston choke her to death right in front of them.

“There is no higher honour,” he said.

Lucian hadn’t seen daylight for three days. They had kept the sack over his head that long.

Now, the world seemed impossibly blue, the sun a merciless garish ball of fire overhead. Everything was washed out, a glowing sheen setting everything ablaze so that he couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the ground began. He had been walking all night, and they had given him a thin broth, a slurp of water and an hour of sleep before beating him back to his feet.

The terrain was even, gravelly, and folded like unmade bed sheets into endless hills and valleys. Prowling the wilds for over forty years had given him the surefootedness to avoid stumbling, but around him he had heard others scrabbling around on their knees and skidding in the scree, along with their pained cries as they were whipped and kicked by their captors.

Now he could see the extent of the convoy, stretching in single file away over hundreds of yards and beyond the next rise. Each of the shuffling figures was torn, marked by charred patches of skin, wrapped in unidentifiable ash-covered rags, gazes locked on the ground at their feet.

The guards were spread out on horseback, creating a tunnel bristling with leather whip-straps, iron pokers and gun barrels.

Lucian looked up at the guard who had lifted his head. Behind a few days’ growth of wispy facial hair, Charlie’s expression conveyed his thoughts at a glance.
Stay quiet, or else
.

Lucian looked down at the mud again, wondering why he no longer had his hood; most still wore theirs.

Maybe it was because they thought he would no longer recognise where he was. If that was so, they were right.

“Welcome to the club,” said a voice at his shoulder.

He looked around to see a barrel-chested man in his sixties, grey bearded and, physically, a powerhouse, especially when compared to the rest of the prisoners. Most of them were little more than wisps, skeletons in motion. His face was so swollen it looked as though he was suffering from Elephantitis, caked along one side in dried blood so old it had become a sticky brown residue; and though he kept pace, he limped on a leg bound in rotten dressings.

Despite his injuries, the stranger smiled, then flicked his head down to indicate they should talk with their eyes on the ground. A brief silence passed as Charlie cantered his mount a little farther ahead, then the stranger huffed through a sharp bout of laughter. “I knew they messed me up bad, but I’d hoped there was something of my ugly mug left.”

Lucian frowned.

I know that voice, he thought. He risked glancing again, and in a momentary flick of his head he scanned the stranger’s swollen face once more. Yes, there was definitely something there he recognised. For a moment he couldn’t place it, but then he reached further back into the depths of memory, and pulled up a name and face he hadn’t thought about in many years.

But no, it couldn’t be.

“Vandeborn?” he said.

Another grunt of laughter. “Ah, maybe I’m not so far gone, after all.” A pause. “McKay, of all the people I could have run into, you’re the last I expected.”

Lucian gave a grunt of his own. “Same goes for you.”

He dropped back, forgetting Charlie. To hell with the kid—if he wanted to beat him, so be it. He fell into step with Max Vandeborn, and the two of them enjoyed a companionable silence for longer than Lucian would have thought possible. For endless minutes, it seemed, there was no need to talk, for all that needed to be said was spread out before them. Their situation couldn’t have been better illustrated by the endless procession of prisoners—all that remained of the free communities of the South.

In time, though, his lips began moving of their own accord. “How long has it been?” he said. “Twenty years?”

Max grunted. “Maybe. I thought longer.”

“How’s life?”

“You know how it is. People come and go, times are good and bad. Recent times, more bad than good, I guess.”

It took Lucian some time to stem a belly-wrenching fit of wheezing laughter. “Tell me about it.”

They walked on, people were whipped, and the bloodied remains of a man whose body had given out was flung atop a pile of other emaciated corpses on the flat-bed of a wagon. Their laughter petered out and when they spoke again, their voices had grown sober and plain.

“What happened?” Lucian said.

“They hit us hard at sunrise. Burned us out, killed half, took half. That was then. They must have whipped a few dozen more to death by now. I haven’t seen anyone from back home for over a day.”

Despite himself, Lucian was disheartened. Max Vandeborn and Bill Bateman had always put the willies into even the most reckless con artists. They had lynched anyone who disrespected the rules of their house.

It was a blow to know even Twingo had crumpled like a house of cards.

He nodded. “Same story everywhere.” He hesitated. “Bill?”

Max shook his head. “Took a knife to the chest.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah. Me too.”

“What are you doing here?” Max said. “Last time I saw you, you were quite the hot shit. I never thought you’d have let them take you alive.”

“I could say the same to you.”

Max cursed. “I should have died back there. God knows I’ve wished for it since. I even tried goading these pussies into sticking me. All my friends back home fell around me, and the others they took have been thrown on the wagons or left in the dirt, but I’m still here. I just can’t bring myself to throw myself on the sword, just in case further down the line there’s a chance to take a few of them with me. Anyways, it feels like it’s almost out of my hands, like something’s keeping me alive, wants me to see something before I’m put out of my misery.”

Lucian’s throat dried. “Funny, I thought the same thing.”

“You saw Him too, then?”

“Saw who?”

“Your brother.”

Lucian’s chest tightened.

So it was true. James really was at the helm of it all. Despite all the signs, he hadn’t been ready to believe it. After so long, it had been all too easy to think him dead. That the blackest mark in their history had never happened.

“So it really is him leading all this?”

“I’ve seen him with these very peepers, friend.”

Lucian nodded, numb.

He changed the subject before his mind could linger. “Where are we heading?”

Max nodded to the sun. “We’ve been tracking north since we left the tunnels they had us holed up in. Straight as an arrow.”

“How do you know?”

Max smiled. “Remember I said
‘welcome to the club’
? I was talking about the hoods. I never had the pleasure of wearing one.”

“Why?” Lucian said, looking once more along the long line of people, most hooded, some not.

“Took me a while to figure it out.”

“Well?”

“The hooded ones they want confused, beaten. They’re the ones they take away for torture whenever we hole up somewhere. They always come back … different. Or they don’t come back at all.”

“And the rest of us?”

“Us, we’re the ones they line up to watch when they raze some other village or group of traders. They make us watch on our knees. See, I figure that’s why we’re here. We’re not for turning. We’re here to see everything we built turn to ash.”

Lucian cursed. “We received a radio message. The council was gathering in Canary Wharf.”

“Radio? A real transmission?”

“Apparently.”

“Think it means somebody else is out there?”

“A lot of people are praying for it, like some magic pill that’ll make everything dandy. But I wouldn’t bet on it.”

They kept walking. Charlie rode up a while and prowled alongside them, his eyes darting to Max—not, Lucian noted with satisfaction, without a note of apprehension about him—before heading up ahead once more. So that was why he had been hooded in the first place: Charlie didn’t want James to know whom he’d brought along for the ride.

When Max started talking again, it was almost to himself. “Some men are born mean, and some are made that way. Chadwick was a fool, too kind for this world, but he was just. He could have made something out of the ash of the Old World, maybe even better than Cain could have. And now he’s set on turning what’s left into dust. What the hell happened to him?”

Lucian didn’t answer. Finally, he said, “You’re wrong. We’re here for more than just to see the dregs of our lot fall. I think James has something more in store for us.”

Max was quiet for a time. “Well, I suppose we’ll see. We’re going somewhere, after all. Many things lie in the North.”

“Many,” Lucian said, but his thoughts lingered on one place in particular.

“I’m going to kill him.” James threw himself over Beth, casting aside the peach vines and cupping her face. In the moonlight her skin glowed like marble, pale and bloodless. Her brow furrowed in intense concentration, and he could see an internal struggle raged behind her eyes. She shook her head, tearing her matted dress off and throwing it onto the dirt.

“No,” she said. “Don’t you dare.”

“That was so stupid, aggravating him like that!”

“I had to. He expects it.”

“You can’t let him do that to you. It’s inhuman.”

“You can’t change the way things are in the Moon, James. He holds all the keys. There’s too much at stake to throw it all away for me.”

James gripped her desperately. “Come with me. Run away!”

“I can’t.” She swallowed hard. “He’ll kill my family. That how he gets any of us to do anything. If anybody hadn’t shown at the banquet tonight …” She mimed holding flaming torch to kindling.

“That son of a bitch deserves to die.” He gripped her by the sides of her head and looked down into the dark holes where her eyes would have been. “I won’t let him get away with this.”

To his surprise, she tittered, a weepy yet stubborn sound devoid of all humour. “With what?”

“Treating you like you were some slab of meat. I can’t believe everyone just … just watched. Even me.”

She sighed and sank to the dirt. Crouched there in her sweat-stained undergarments, hangdog and pale, she was more alluring than when her hips had been in full gyration before the head table. Here was the real Beth Tarbuck, breathing in the scent of ripe peaches and petrichor, wriggling her toes into the soft wet earth. The shallow imposter who had danced before him, even with all the rouge exposed flesh rippling under golden torchlight, had been but a twisted shadow. The ache didn’t come from his loins this time, but his chest, so sharp it could have doubled him over.

“That was nothing,” she muttered. “He behaved himself tonight, for your sake, I’m sure.”

“What do you mean?” He crouched down beside her and, for a moment, glanced up the hill at Alice McKinley’s crooked form silhouetted against the great gibbous moon. She had known Beth would be down here, even though Malverston had neglected to invite her to the festivities. She hadn’t offered to accompany him, though he sensed it hadn’t been for a lack of caring—quite the opposite. She gave the tiniest of nods and then vanished into the mass of Newquay’s Moon.

“He might have you believe that all that was in your honour, but there is no shortage of his little banquets. Every time he orders the whole town to turn over their finest food and cider, and he brings all his slimy friends from all over to sit at those tables and worship his great golden shlong.” She sneered. “Know what they say about men with big feet? Well it ain’t true. But men like him have to be compensating for something, don’t they?” The sneer lingered on her face for a moment, then slid away like water off slate. “Believe me, most people around here never saw the other side of those doors before tonight. I suppose at least that part was for your benefit. And where there’s a banquet, there’s dancing.” She growled and cast the torn remnants of her dress into the orchard.