Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (29 page)

Charlie grunted somewhere out of sight. “You’d be surprised what you can find if you push hard enough.”

Up ahead, someone crumpled to the mud, falling flat on their face in a stupor of blind exhaustion. Nobody dared try picking them up; they’d all learned that the punishment for that was to be beaten until they were lying right next to the fallen. An exasperated guard shunted the muddied figure to the side of the path with the base of his pole, and the droves of feet marched on.

Hundreds of bodies lay in their wake, strung over endless miles.

“How long are you going to keep marching us like this? You won’t have any of us left if we go much farther,” Lucian said.

Vandeborn guffawed. “Wouldn’t put it past the sick fucks to have it as their plan all along. March the lot of us into the ground, then keep the strongest for house-slaves. Men can be cruel. Just read your history. It’s the same story, over and over. All that crap about civilisation was just a phase … a spark in the shadows.”

Charlie laughed openly. He was within shooting distance of genuine humour. “Don’t you worry now. Won’t be long.”

As though to illustrate his point, he pointed to a sign that had appeared from over a hilltop ahead.

“No,” Lucian whispered.

“What?” Vandeborn said.

Lucian didn’t reply. He wasn’t sure he could even if he’d tried.

The sign was old, beaten and so weathered that the paint had been stripped away completely. But the raised lettering was still there, and Lucian read it with mounting terror:

WELCOME TO RADDEN COUNTY

Welcome home, James, he thought.

James’s frosted breath twirled upwards in the cold night air as he saddled his mount. He took his time, moving with calculated smooth movements, lest he make a single rattle or chink of metal on metal. His head ached, fuzzy with exhaustion, but his vague stab at sleep had ended only in frustration.

That strange moorland the traveller’s hands had zapped into his head had hijacked his mind’s eye. Whenever he had dropped towards the warm miasma of sleep, the strange vision had become animated, spooling to life before his eyes like an Old World clockwork music-box. He’d flown over heathland, past cragged iron-grey peaks and the haunted remains of clusters of towns and satellite villages, hugging the rugged terrain. Each was wreathed in thick fog that slugged across the low-lying moorland, sheathed obsidian-black lakes from view, and made islands of naked rocky bluffs—they thrust through the blanket of land-cloud along the myriad ridges, as though the Earth had grown teeth.

Despite his efforts, his tossing and turning, he had been trapped with the flickering film reel behind his eyes.

He should have been thinking of Beth. He was worried for her, and a dull ache had already taken up residence in the fibrous meat of his heart.

Then there was the animal part of him that throbbed blue agony from his loins, calling out to the ruddy-faced angel who had put her hands on him and set a fire down there that would take days to die down.

One way or another, he knew she should have been the sole cause of his insomnia.

Yet still the staring images played out, etched onto the backs of his eyelids. He knew it was Radden. There was no merit in doubting it; the certainty nested inside him like a cold perfect sphere, unblemished and impenetrable.

Then there were the tunnels. They had come again after he had abandoned any hope of sleep and taken to padding the icy flagstones in his room, looking out over the moonlit wheat stalks that were growing lush and tall under their hands’ tending love.

Reaping time would come soon, and they would be kept busy for many weeks with the grinding, the bagging, the storing and the trade—trade that would see dozens of caravans trail across the vast emptiness between them and the rest of their tenuous fledgling alliance. And when that happened, they would scarcely have time for anything else, least of all the schooling Alexander had prostituted them out to deliver.

But for now, all that wheat just lay swaying in the crisp night air, and their pupils-to-be were miles away.

He thought he would find that comforting. Instead, all it did was bring yet more mental images. This time it wasn’t of the ancient weathered landscape that had birthed him, yet he had no memory of—but still could somehow see—but instead the tunnels he had flown down so briefly when the traveller’s hands had rested over his ears. He had been flying along them once again, and had come rushing up on that final room with shocking speed, and he could have sworn he was actually flying. His stomach fluttered, and the deceleration as he came rushing up upon the room’s single occupant was potent.

The young man had been there once again, his hands splayed out in welcome. “
I’m waiting
,” he said, just as before.

Then the visions had died, the mental images vanished, as though a thought bubble had popped somewhere in his head.

In that moment a new sensation had come: a strange impetus in his feet and lower legs, an itch. And before he knew what was happening, his legs had carried him to his wardrobe, possessed by a will not his own, and stranded him there staring in at his things. He had begun to pack clothes and supplies, then, not sure why he was doing it but certain he had to. Once he had finished, as though satisfied, his feet had then carried him out to the stables, stopping along the way with foot-tapping impatience until he’d picked up the saddle before him.

He was alone in the courtyard, checking the restraints and tying a bedroll to the back of the saddle, his brows pulled over his eyes in a deep frown. Still his feet itched, pointing away along the path leading to the road. Despite the darkness, the way they pointed seemed lit up like a great glaring beam.

He had business out there. And it couldn’t wait.

Bathed in silver moonlight, in the silence of the courtyard with his friends and family sleeping peacefully not far away, something that felt like grinding gears spooled up deep in his head. Then, despite his disbelief, he raised his leg onto the first stirrup. He was sure he would have climbed on had the voice not sounded from close by.

“Looks like I’m not the only one who can’t sleep.” Alexander’s voice was calm, but confused. He was silent a moment, and James could sense his own form—which was surely a mere fuzzy silhouette in such low light—being scanned. “Going somewhere?”

James sighed and fell back onto the cobbles. “Go back to bed,” he said.

“Can’t sleep. Nothing unusual about that. All the years I’ve spent haunting the library until the early hours, I never knew I had a fellow insomniac.” His tone was conversional, but James wasn’t fooled. Alex was a master of distraction; James knew he was just filling the silence until he could get a better hold on the situation.

“Just go back.”

Alex stepped from the shadows. In the low light his big, frank eyes—those eyes that had won over angels and ogres alike—twinkled like shards of quartz.

“There’s a lot to talk about. We didn’t get a chance to go over what was said at dinner. Let’s step inside. What do you say?”

The rhythm of his speech was one James recognised all too well. The falsity that was Alexander Cain had appeared in the courtyard, standing where Alex had stood only moments ago.

“Don’t even try your charm on me. I’m immune.”

Alex smiled, and the persona evaporated. Now his brother stood before him. “Where are you going?”

James looked off along the path that was, at least to his eyes, lit up as though with beams of midday sunlight, then turned back to Alex, standing amidst the darkness of dead night, while nearby an owl hooted balefully. Even closer someone gave an explosive snore and rustled in their bed sheets. “I—I don’t know,” he said.

“Then won’t you come inside?”

“No.”

Despite the darkness, he saw Alex’s arched eyebrow.

He shook his head. “I have to go. I can’t explain why. I just have to.”

“And you don’t know where?”

James blinked. “We both know where.”

Alex was still for a moment, then ran a hand through the thickness of his beard. “You really saw something? And now you’re going to follow these … What? Flashes? Visions? You’re going to follow them off into the night?”

“Don’t say it like that!”

“How am I supposed to say it?”

“Not like it’s completely crazy at least.”

“Isn’t it?”

“You’ve said yourself, nothing’s impossible. The End proved that.”

Alex scowled. He gestured as though to expound something forceful, then curled his finger back into his palm, and let his hand drop again. “Fine. But can’t it wait until morning?”

“No …” Even now the itch in his feet was throbbing, rising up his legs. Soon, he knew, it would be maddening. “It has to be now.”

“And what is it you plan to do when you get wherever you’re going?”

“I don’t know! I don’t know any more than you. That’s why I have to go. I have to find out.”

Alex mouthed in the gloom while James swung up onto the saddle. The silence was one other men might have filled with appeals like ‘
What am I supposed to tell the others?
’ or ‘
We need you to help with the reaping!
’ but Alex only watched.

He watched right up until James had swung his rifle up over his back, taken the reins up into his hands, and begun trotting a few paces from the courtyard.

Then his silence finally broke. “They’ll be here tomorrow.”

It was the tone that made James turn: guilt.

He wheeled his mount around to face Alex, and suddenly the images of Radden and the young man with the streaks beneath his eyes were gone. “Not Malverston’s men?”

Alex’s throat worked up and down. “They’ll arrive by midday.”

James mouthed wordlessly, giving Alex time to step forward and take the reins in his own hands.

“How could you not tell me they were coming so soon?” James barked. “Were you planning on letting us know when they appeared at the bloody fence with their knapsacks and writing pads?”

“Malverston’s unstable. He hasn’t got long left, and he senses it. He’s going to hold onto whatever he has for as long as he can, and he’s trying to cement his legacy.”

“So he needs heirs who know the Old World.” James heard his own voice as though from far away. He felt as though a great weight had suddenly been tied around his ankle.

The itch in his leg was still there, but dulled now. And even if it had been raw enough to send him screaming, he couldn’t have moved from the courtyard. Alex’s shame alone, a thing he had seldom seen so naked and true, was enough to keep him rooted to the spot.

“Just give me a day,” Alex said. “Help me talk the others around, get Malverston’s men settled, get something going. If we can pull this off, we can have the Moon. The mayor’s time is almost up. All we have to do is give him the comfort of the lie, stoke his fantasy of a council of dedicated followers maintaining his empire after he’s gone. We both know those conniving bastards under him will tear each other apart as soon as Malverston’s gone. Then we can move in, and start doing some good.”

“Hark who’s calling those slime balls conniving,” James said. His heart sank. “Alex, we can’t keep doing this. I don’t want to play dirty, even if it means getting a leg up on the mission.”

“It’s the only way we’re ever going to make a real difference! That’s the real world, James. We don’t live in some storybook. Dirty politics have been a part of every society since the dawn of civilisation.”

Maybe we’re better off leaving civilisation in the dust, in that case, James thought.

“Give me a day,” he said. “That’s all I’m asking.”

James hesitated, but Alex seemed to sense he would relent in the end. He’d already relaxed, and his shoulders had dropped.

James shivered in the chill of the night air. Now that the moment of flight had passed and he had grown still, the cold was beginning to seep through his thermal layers. For a summer evening, it was freezing. Thinking of it brought back memories of the ice that had formed on his head when the traveller had taken his hands away.

James climbed down from his mount, which snuffled as though in protest and dug at the cobbles with its hooves. “You don’t seem all that sceptical,” he said. “I expected you to tie me to the bed.”

Alex pulled a face, but James couldn’t place the expression. He took his mount by the reins at its snout and led it back toward the stables, and they walked beside one another. James waited for his reticence to wane.

“You said you were cold after,” Alex said finally. “That there was ice where he’d touched you, when you saw whatever it was he wanted you to see.”

“Yes,” James said carefully.

Alex sighed. “It’s called the Frost. At least, that’s what we call it. A cold that fills you up so deep it feels like you could never be warm again, right down to your bones. For just a moment you feel hollowed out, almost like you’re not real at all. And you see things, things in a deep, dark place …”

James shivered again, a full-body shudder, and this time it wasn’t from the midnight chill. “You’ve felt it?”

“Everyone who survived the End felt it. You did too, though you must have been too young to remember it.”