Genetopia (13 page)

The faithwalkers carried between them the four who had fallen, none of them being fit to walk. Flint walked with someone’s legs across his shoulder, separated from changed, still-changing, flesh by only a few folds of rough fabric.

At the ravine they were reduced to single file, and suddenly the legs were a terrible burden. Shocks and tremors passed back along the rope bridge from Walkedfar before him and he felt that with each step his foot would go through the bridge into emptiness.

The wine lent confidence to his movements, though, and they reached the far side without mishap. Once there, Flint gratefully allowed another of the walkers to take the load from his shoulder, and he walked, lightheaded and slightly apart from the others, back up the rock path to the Communary.

He was to spend the night there, he realised. This night and how many more before he could be on his way? He was free, he knew. Having proved himself before these people’s Lord, he was their equal, their guest. But when would he have the opportunity to leave?

He followed his fellow walkers into the cool interior of the Communary.

~

The building reminded him of the Old Hall at Trecosann where Callum and Petria tended the changing vats. A deep sense of age hung in the dry air, and moonlight pooled under tall windows with coloured, pearlescent glass.

Someone lit a line of oil lamps and Flint saw that the floor consisted of compacted mud and rushes. Sleeping rolls were removed from a shelf near the door and spread on the ground and the four fallen were eased onto them.

Flint stood, uncertain. There seemed to be an understanding between the other faithwalkers to which he was not privy. They had been together for some time before this night, he knew, studying and training in preparation for their trial of faith.

A hand, light on his arm. “Brother Flintheart.”

It was the youngster, Walkedfar. “We must tend to the fallen,” he said. “I will sit with Rendel–will you join me?” He indicated the Trecosi woman Flint had helped carry back to the Communary–the one who had refused to give her name when he had first encountered her. It struck him then as incredibly sad that he should only learn her name after she had fallen...

He nodded. “Thank you ... Brother Walkedfar.”

They sat, legs crossed, either side of Rendel.

“She was of Clan Treco,” said Walkedfar, after a protracted silence, broken only by murmured voices from elsewhere in the Communary. “She came from a place called Tremellen.”

Flint nodded. Tremellen was one of the small clan settlements strung out along the river Elver to the south of Trecosann, little more than a jetty and a cluster of podhuts established to service the haul-boats that plied the river. “I come from Trecosann,” he said. “I did not know her.” Not unnaturally: travel between settlements being limited and the clan being one of the largest, or so Flint had been taught. He had visited the southern river settlements only two or three times.

“I came from a village in Spinster’s Spine,” said Walkedfar. “I do not recall its name. I left three years ago and travelled from settlement to settlement, seeking faith, although I did not know it at the time.”

Walkedfar could only be about fifteen years old now, so he must have been young indeed when he set out.

“I met Sister Judgement in Beshusa and she showed me faith, and so I came to Restitution.”

Rendel gave a shudder then, so intense that her back arched and she pushed herself up from the ground before subsiding. Immediately, Walkedfar reached for a leafsponge, dipped it in a pot of golden water and pressed it to the fallen one’s forehead.

“We pray that our fallen sister’s change be painless, that there is still space in her heart for the Lord.”

Flint stared at the sweat beading Rendel’s pale face, forming narrow tracks down into her damp, sandy hair. Her eyes were closed, twisting and twitching beneath their lids as if she dreamed.

Rendel had been covered with a blanket, but it had worked loose at one side, twisted in her grip. Flint straightened it, and saw again that she had a fine bracelet on her wrist. He recalled noticing that it was the only thing she wore on her ill-fated attempt at faith-walking. The bracelet was made of rivershells, marbled blue and turquoise and threaded on cane fibres.

One of the shells was broken.

Amber!

Holding Rendel by the wrist, Flint said, “Where did you get this?”

Eyes still closed. No response.

“What is it?” asked Walkedfar. “What’s the matter?”

Flint turned to him. “This bracelet,” he said. “It belongs to my sister. She went missing from home ... I’m trying to find her.”

The tears.
I hate you! I hate you I hate you I
hate
you!
They had been play-fighting and the bracelet had broken and Amber had been distraught. It was only a bracelet, but he’d broken it and she had been as mad as any nine year-old could get. He’d repaired it, but imperfectly, a shell still broken, and after that she had worn the thing ever since.

“Had Rendel been here long before tonight?” Flint asked.

“A day or two,” said Walkedfar. “She was the last to arrive. I don’t think she was fully prepared.”

If she had travelled straight from Tremellen she might have encountered Amber either there or en route. But why would Amber be in Tremellen?

He knew, of course. The only reason to be there was either to service the mutt trade or to be a part of it...

Just then Rendel’s lips drew back from her teeth, an animal sneer, no sound escaping.

And her eyes opened, swivelled, resting on Walkedfar and then on Flint.

She didn’t see him, he felt sure: she was looking into some other world entirely. He saw the pain and loss in her eyes. The horrible realisation of transfomation. The terror.

Her body bucked again, and Walkedfar leaned over her, held her shoulders to the ground. He peered up at Flint and Flint felt exposed by the look in his eyes.

He turned away, heard the boy say, “We need to hold her. She’s in pain.”

Flint nodded. He put a hand on her hip, reached across to lean on her other hip too, trying to stop the convulsions that were contorting her body.

He felt bones shifting beneath his hands, and was struck by the intensity of the change, the speed.

She shuddered again, and Walkedfar called, “Lightfoot! Mercy! We need help.”

Two other faithwalkers joined them as Rendel twisted and convulsed in a tangle of sleeping mat.

Flint pulled away, rocked back on his heels. He stared at the heaving figure, the three shadowy forms struggling to pin her in place.

She was groaning now, as if in labour. Giving birth to a new self.

Memories rushed him.

He stood, took a step back.

“Flintheart?”

Walkedfar was peering up at him as he wrestled with the fallen faithwalker. His face was a pale grey blob in the Communary’s low light.

Flint stepped back again.

“Brother Flintheart?”

He turned, stumbled, rushed at the door, swung it wide, and staggered out into the cool night air. Stars pricked the sky overhead, crowding above him. A full moon hung low and swollen over the treetops. Moths whirred in light spilled from the Communary windows.

He ran, bare feet lacerating on the stony path, pain feeding his panic.

~

Brother Seesthroughlies found him in the square.

The small shelter they had constructed for him when he was a prisoner still stood and somehow Flint had found it the previous night, curled up and slept deeply.

Now, Flint peered up at the Riverwalker through eyes slitted against the glare of the morning sun. Seesthroughlies squatted, tiny bones jangling from his quickfibre headband. Some were tied into his beard, too, Flint saw.

“Rendel found her judgement before the Lord just before dawn,” Seesthroughlies said softly.

Flint nodded, swallowed. He would never know, now, how she had come to be wearing Amber’s bracelet.

He had abandoned Rendel when she needed his help. He felt that he had failed a test, although there was no judgement in the Riverwalker’s eyes.

“I... I knew a man once,” said Flint, compelled to explain himself. “I watched him change. It was his punishment. He had been found guilty of ... attacking ... my mother ... me...”

His tears stung his cheeks, salty moisture on dry, exposed skin.

He remembered...

...the mutt-stick, heavy in his hand. Too heavy, too big for a boy to handle comfortably. Thrusting and jabbing with the stick. Flint, Jescka and Tarn at the front of an angry mob, all crowding in, baying for justice, for retribution.

The look in Cederotreco’s eyes had haunted Flint ever since: resignation, perhaps even some traces of pity. A look held for a brief moment, engraved on his mind for life. The man who had been his teacher now pausing in his last moments of humanity.

The sharpened point of a mutt-stick breaking the moment, forcing Cedero to step back. Onto the ramp that led down into the changing vat.

He remembered watching the actions of his parents, studying their anger and hatred, mimicking it and feeling it, savouring it, understanding the power of revenge, of justice. He remembered the intensity of the feelings that took a hold of him that night: the passion, the pride, the boyish triumph that he was at the centre of such an event.

And later, Cedero the teacher, lying alone in the straw of a holding pen, the fevers taking hold. Boyish triumphalism fading, passion detumescing.

Horror stealing in.

Flint was nine years old and had seen many changings, many mutts and beasts dipped in the vats to fortify the breeding lines.

But never before a man.

Flint had already endured, and subsequently blacked out, the attack, the beating, and now he was witnessing the true horror of the justice he had helped mete out.

Days later, Cedero was banished from Trecosann, sent out into the wilds to die. Moments before they took him away, Flint had looked into the man’s eyes and there had been nothing there, a chilling blankness in one who had been so mentally engaging, who had been loved and hated by all around him for his intelligence and charm. Nothing.

Perhaps it was best for Rendel that the fevers had taken her from the world, that she had found her judgement so swiftly.

“We live in a time of trials,” said Seesthroughlies softly. “It is a sad truth that most of our kind will fall before the Lord.”

~

Time never passes at a constant rate, Flint realised. A mere day had passed and yet the Faithwalking ceremony, the passing of Rendel and Flint’s humiliation–all seemed so distant.

And most dramatically of all, the fallen had changed.

“Come,” Tallofmind had told him, holding out a hand, beckoning for Flint to rise to his feet and follow the Riverwalker through the hard-mud streets of Restitution.

The Communary’s dark stone walls stood before them, narrow windows revealing nothing. Inside: the three survivors of those who had fallen in the previous evening’s ceremony, each being tended by one or two of the former novices.

Two–Patros and Mikkel–had taken traits common among the mutt population, a change Flint recalled from the dippings guided by Callum: a skeletal shifting, a broadening across the shoulder, a layering of new muscle across back, shoulders, neck, so much that the head appeared to sit lower. In their eyes, Flint saw nothing, a blankness he recalled again from the mutt dippings.

“Patros,” said Tallofmind, putting a hand on the young man’s head. Eyes turned. “Remember me, Patros?”

Patros nodded. “T... Tuh...”

Tallofmind shook his head, and turned back to Flint. He tapped the side of his head and said, “In here he is still Patrosbern Elpatros. No longer True, perhaps, no longer fit for the Lord’s judgement, but all is not lost.”

The third, Millice, was different. They came to stand before her. She looked up at them and at first impression seemed barely changed from the attractive young novice Flint had noted with interest the previous day.

But something had shifted, distorted. It was in her eyes, Flint realised. Something disturbed him as her eyes found his face. He felt a burst of relief when she turned to his guide.

“Tallofmind,” she said to the short Riverwalker. “You bring Brother Flintheart here to demonstrate to him the inevitability of change. You wish him to see that change can be both tragic, as poor Rendel found, and unsettling and hard to define, which is why you bring him to me. Look.” She said this directly to Flintheart, spreading her arms, palms upwards. He could not help but study her, seeing little sign of change, yet sensing that something was adrift. “You are aroused by the sight of me, Brother Flintheart, and yet equally you are repulsed because you know that I have changed and you do not know in what way. You struggle with your deep-seated belief that all change is harmful and corrupting, while the evidence before you indicates that change is merely
change
. Brother Tallofmind wants you to see this, he wants you to embrace his understanding that we live in the end days for your kind. The last trump has wiped out most of True humankind and those who remain will face judgement–perhaps today, perhaps tomorrow, perhaps in a hundred years. The True are kept artificially at the top of the pyramid because all of nature has been engineered to defer to your kind and yet even that cannot preserve you as a species. When you find your judgement, the world will be inherited by those who have embraced change. We may be Lost, Brother Flintheart, but only because you can no longer find us.”

Tallofmind stood quietly to one side, waiting until Millice fell silent. Sweat was running down her face now, effort swamping her, as she still fought to recover from her changing.

He led Flint away. “The intererior change can be the most fundamental of all,” he said. “Millice has become something of a savant.”

“Why did you bring me here?” asked Flint.

“To show you the future,” said Tallofmind.

~

They fed the body of Rendel and the other three fallen novices to the natural changing lagoons where the faithwalking ceremony had taken place. Flint helped Walkedfar carry her all the way from the communary.