Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) (30 page)

He’d been only a baby.

“So you believe me?”

Alex looked as though he was going to shake his head, but then he gritted his teeth and nodded. “I do.”

James thought of the young man again, those dark shadows, his low voice.
‘I’m waiting,’
he’d said.

Did Alex know about him too?

He thought about asking, but bit his tongue. Perhaps that was a step too far from good sense.

They reached the stables and Alex helped him loosen the saddle on his mount.

“Why me?” James said. “Why would that guy come all this way to make
me
see things of all people?”

A wry smile leaped to Alex’s face. The quickness of it told James it was an automatic reaction. “Because you’re special.”

He offered no more.

James didn’t ask for any. He was used to people saying that. They had been his entire life. Alex and everyone else expected him to carry on the mission when the elders had grown grey and turned to dust.

Except, now, maybe there was some deeper truth to it.

And Radden? What about that? There’s something special about that, too.

He looked at Alex, concentrating on stowing the stirrups in the dark, and made to ask him that question. They were both of that place, after all, but only Alex had any memory of it. What made it so different?

But it didn’t seem right to ask him, here in the dark. He wouldn’t get a straight answer, he sensed it.

Alex was right. It could wait until morning.

He had already begun preparing himself for a long night of restlessness, battling that irresistible urge to leap forth towards the fences and out into the world. Only moments ago it had been white fire, searing to the point of being blinding.

But now, curiously, he was astonished to find it gone. There was no certainty, no illuminated path, no itch. Nothing.

It seemed whatever possessive force that had infected him was satiated for now. It had got what it wanted.

In its absence, thoughts of Beth came flooding back, and fell upon his heart like a pile of masonry.

He made a promise to himself as they left the stables and headed back toward the courtyard: he would deal with this insanity in Radden, and then he would put an end to Malverston’s reign. And he meant it:
he
would put an end to it, not some common wasting disease that would take him while he was most likely in a bliss of mead and snuff. He didn’t deserve that.

Alex was silent as they walked back towards their bedrooms, his head low, his dark lips drawn so tight that they reflected slivers of starlight. James was surprised by how scared that silence made him, because maybe, just maybe, Alex was more afraid of Radden than any of them.

Now why might that be?

Robert woke to the sound of distant rattles and popping.

He rubbed his eyes with bunched fists, feeling like the world’s biggest toddler, and started groaning immediately. Everything hurt. The kind of nebulous, woolly pain that comes with a twenty-hour sleep deficit drifted around inside his skull.

A day had passed. Endless hours of scouring the forests and meadows around New Canterbury had yielded no sign of the vagrants. They had melted away into nothing. The night had set eight hundred exhausted souls fit to tremble themselves into the nuthouse, but as twilight had fallen, something had changed in the folks locked up in the cathedral. Men and women who had only hours before been dull-eyed sheep had stepped forward with their hearts on their shoulders, ready to pitch in and stand watch and protect their families.

Hope had turned the table.

Over a hundred people had set up a tight perimeter around the inhabited part of the city, armed with every scrap of metal meanness their armoury had to offer. As the amber glow of approaching dawn had crushed out the pitch dark of starless night, they had started barricading the streets, pushing rusted motorcars and hauling sacks of grit, piling whatever Old World detritus they could find into walls as tall as a man.

By then, somebody had told Robert to go lie down. He must have needed it because he didn’t remember anything after that, nor who had wrested his weapons from him and led him home.

Now he groaned. His head was throbbing and his muscles screamed in protest. His mouth tasted like a cat had taken a hearty dump down his gullet, and a great beast roared in the pit of his stomach. He groped the sheets on the other side of the bed, hoping to feel the warm softness of Sarah’s belly, but found only uncreased linen.

“Sarah?” he called.

No answer. The heavy fog of dusty silence.

Weak, yellow morning sunlight lanced in through the open window, pooling on the floor and setting the dusty Old World carpet alight. He swung his legs out of bed and groaned again before struggling to his feet and padding across to the windowsill. The distant rattle and pop was louder here, coming from afar.

For a minute, he leaned against the frame and massaged his aching head, looking through slitted eyes at the silhouettes still patrolling the nearby rooftops. It seemed the vigil had been kept at least this long. Perhaps the blind groping panic had passed. He glanced back at the bed, wanting nothing more than to climb in and pull the covers over his aching head.

Then something clicked in the back of his mind, and he bolted upright, sending his head crashing into the window box ceiling.

He knew that sound. The popping and cracking came in bursts, followed by the ring of stark silence in repeating intervals. And on the brink of audibility, preceding each bout of rattling, there was shouting.

Gunfire.

He ran for the stairs. The rickety old house rumbled and creaked on its foundations to the beat of his thundering steps.

He hauled on his boots and duster, and was pounding the streets before he had time to lose his balance. Once he was hurtling along the cobbles, however, he wobbled a moment, caught off guard by how weak his body had become.

I’m getting lazy. It’s this place. Food off the stove, running water, electricity. A sham of Old World suburbia. It’s been enough to fool us into thinking we don’t need to be ready. The body is just a machine, and badly kept machines run down.

He grabbed a lamp post and regained his balance, then wobbled off once again, heading for the nearest sentry outpost.

Goddamn cobbles are going to break my ankle. All this used to be so easy. Christ, I’m old.

The three-storey Victorian red brick apartment block appeared up ahead. He burst in through the doorless entryway and took the stairs to the roof four at a time.

Gunshots still buzzed afar, the whip crack of small-arms fire, probably pistols and .32 rifles. It was coming in volleys, each preceded by that same barking voice. He could now tell it was far away, beyond the borders of the city in the fields, but that did nothing to quell his hammering heart.

He reached the rooftop and stopped just before the doorway. “Passage,” he called breathlessly.

A voice came from just beyond the threshold. “Password?”

Robert felt a moment’s relief at how calm the voice was. Maybe they weren’t as defenceless as he’d thought. “Creek.”

“Alright.” The sharp click of a firearm hammer being lowered.

He stepped out onto the roof and nodded to the trio perched close to the ledge on their haunches.

His relief evaporated almost immediately.

They each flicked clumsy salutes, holding onto their weapons with grim determination. Weapons too big and heavy for muscles used to suburban chores. Weapons they hadn’t known how to fire only hours ago, let alone hit anything.

Robert had tried to assign at least one veteran guard to each team, but there had been too many volunteers and little more than two dozen guards. And if he had made the teams larger, they would lose any semblance of stealth. He had been forced to put guns in untrained hands and leave them to make do.

It hadn’t seemed so very foolish at the time. How tired he must have been to become that deluded. He couldn’t afford to let himself get in that state again.

Mr Higgins was by far the oldest of the three, a grizzled stick insect of a man with a clump of frizzy white wool for hair. “Mr Strong, sir, you’re awake,” he bleated.

“I am.”

“Maybe I could suggest you go back to bed a while longer. You were in quite the delirium when you left us.”

“And you don’t look so great now,” one of his young companions said. Robert thought his name was Mark Pegg, but it could have been Danny Succo. He couldn’t have been older than sixteen, and he cringed when Robert turned his gaze on him.

The other young man, himself twenty at most, was pale, his eyes fixed on the street.

“I’m fine,” Robert said.

They all fidgeted at the bass of his reverberating impatient tone.

Two boys and an old man, sweaty-faced and shy because they’re afraid of … What, being reprimanded? Or are they afraid of not being up to scratch?

The fact that they worry means they’re
not
up to scratch. I need soldiers, not farmers and children.

But that was all New Canterbury had to offer. Ironic: the city was arguably home to the most powerful man in the known world, was the crown jewel of their order; yet, of all the alliance strongholds, it was also the most defenceless.

He looked at their holds on the rifles again, awkward and unsteady, as though each barrel were in fact a great twelve-foot lead pole.

Could they even fire those things if a parade of these monsters came stamping up the street?

He suppressed a sigh of anguish. The spell of optimism he’d felt before was now a distant memory.

The hissing firecracker-burst of gunshots came again, and he turned to the city in search of the source. Higgins and the boys didn’t seem perturbed. “What’s going on?” he said.

“First try-outs, as ordered,” Higgins said, puffing out his chest.

“We helped pick from the long list,” Mark/Danny said, giving Robert a fawning approval-seeking smile.

Robert’s heart skipped a beat. “What are you talking about?” he said.

The three looked at one another uneasily.

“Your orders, Mr Strong,” Higgins said with care. “The ones you asked to be relayed.”

“What orders?”

“About forming the militia.”

Higgins’s face fell slack when Robert surged forward and seized him by the lapels. Mark/Danny looked ready to faint, while the other lad had taken to once again scanning the streets.

“I want you to think very carefully about what you say next,” Robert breathed. “Who gave those orders on my behalf?”

The corner of Higgins’s mouth twitched as though he thought for a moment Robert’s outburst was a joke, or a test. But Robert had fixed him with a gaze honed over a long childhood of hard lessons in the far north, where you killed your dinner, and often had to kill again to keep it.

The gaze had been a gift from his father. Pa had been in the ground almost fifteen years, but now Robert heard his voice bubble up from the black ooze of distant memory. “
It’s all in the eyes, boy. You kin hold a gun to some men’s heads and get nothing’ but gab for yer trouble. But you get your killer’s stare down pat, and you kin make a man do anythin’.
”

It had been a long time since he’d used that stare, but some things you never forgot, especially things that had kept you alive.

Higgins stammered, “Your fiancée, Mr Strong.”

Robert dropped him in shock, and Higgins crumpled to the ground. In his haste, Robert hadn’t been aware of holding the man a foot off the ground.

Then he was hurtling down the stairs again. They shouted after him but he didn’t hear what they were saying, then he burst out onto the streets and kept running, bounding across the cobbles.

The firing squad was spread out along a thirty-yard stretch, each member facing a humanoid target made of sandbags, lashed twigs and spare rags. Holding small-calibre pistols that were dwarfed even by the women’s hands, they each took aim, their faces screwed up in concentration, and waited for the signal.

“Fire!” Sarah called, and a host of waspish explosions sounded in quick succession.

The targets leaped on their fixings, quivering and throwing off puffs of sand and showering splinters into the high grass.

Each member of the squad then carefully put on their safety catches, handed the gun to the next person, and then made their way to the back of the lines strung out behind them. In all, there must have been sixty or seventy people.

“Better,” Sarah said, a satisfied smile crossing her face as she stood with arms akimbo. She even managed to keep composed when Robert thundered into the clearing and gave a wordless cry that brought deathly silence down heavy over the congregation.

Despite a mounting medley of disbelief and fury, he had to admire her for that.

He didn’t stop his barrelling approach until he towered over a foot above her, staring straight down into her naked eyes. They hadn’t been able to find replacement glasses for her yet. She looked strange without them. Squinting to compensate, furrows had appeared in her peachy face, making her look more severe, waspish and older.