Half Discovered Wings (9 page)

Gabel recalled his
puzzled conversation with Caeles after the attack. Caeles had said,
‘Must have been an errant.’

‘
I
don’t know what that is.’

‘
Sure. Pre-Conflict terminology; you guys are used to freaks, I
guess. It’s what we call people born with strange abilities. There
was quite a lot at one time or another. It was a mystery for a
while until we realised that most of them had been created in a
lab. Our ninja-guy – he had a belt over his eyes. He didn’t need to
see.’

The
reality of this caused them great perturbation over the following
days.
An “errant”. A Scathac ninja.
Why?

The days passed, and though she knew it was hurting her,
Rowan insisted on resting
for at least the morning of every Sabbath that
passed. On the third Sunday from Pirene, Caeles sat by Gabel and
helped him make the fire.

‘
As far as I can tell, the old man is happy to let you think of
Rowan’s good health as our objective, for now at least. If that’s
what you’re after, then we should keep on moving just as quickly as
we can.’

‘
When we visited you in Pirene, you behaved as though you and
he had met before. Is that true?’

‘
You could say that. I’ve see him from time to time. Not
through choice, you understand. It’s hard to explain, and it’s a
long story in any case. Usually violence makes him … go away for a
while.’

Gabel took a moment to digest that. ‘What do
you
think the magus’
objective is? The job he’s given us?’

‘
I wouldn’t know,’ Caeles replied. He looked at the lines he
was making in the earth with a stick – an eight-pronged
star.

‘
Do you think the lake will kill her?’

Gabel thought Caeles looked surprised at such a flat
question. He watched Caeles stand, rubbing his thighs, and wondered
if the cyborg saw in Gabel what Gabel tried his hardest to hide:
stubborn stoicism and an unhappy vulnerability.

‘
I don’t know,’ Caeles said simply.

The hunter
looked over at the young woman and nodded. ‘I would not wish
it.’

~

The next week was still cold, but the chill seemed to have
reached a peak. The only change came exactly a week later, when the
magus opened his eyes in the morning to find his vision blurred by
frost on his eyelashes, and a thin sheet of soft white snow all
around him. The clearing was patched with it, as only some of the
snow had slipped through the canopy of trees. It had only been a
light shower, but something that put foreboding into the magus’s
heart.

He stood and brushed his blankets down. He hung them up to
dry. His fingertips were cold, and he clasped them tightly in his
wrinkled fist, heating them. The magus rarely felt the cold like
this.

‘
Gabel suggested we set off as soon as possible,’ Rowan said,
walking up. In her hand was a large piece of stiffening bread,
which she passed to him. ‘I hope we arrive in the next town
soon.’

‘
São Jantuo is still a while off, unfortunately.’

‘
Is it a large place?’ She asked it as she strapped her
blankets to Gabel’s backpack. Each time she did so, the magus felt
a pang of guilt emanate from her, that Gabel should be burdened
with her luggage.

‘
Not especially,’ he said. ‘It’s barely a city, if you ask me.
But larger than a town, and bustling; the market places there are
pleasant and full of interesting things.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe I’ll
buy you a trinket if you keep it quiet from the hunter.’

She offered a grim smile. ‘I’d like that very much, sir. But
I sincerely doubt … What I mean to say is that I’m weakening, more
so than when I was home, to be sure. There I lay in bed and could
recover my strength, but out here…’

The magus nodded. He
had noticed the same deterioration in strength and energy. He had
similar doubts that Rowan would succumb to her illness all too soon
on this journey.

The four ate breakfast, and it was that day when Gabel
finally removed the bandages from around his torso. The wounds
given to him by the Scathac had been deep, but he recovered
quickly. The bandage around his shoulder, however, would remain
there until they reached the city by the Lual.

Caeles sat close to the fire. He didn’t need warmth –
everything his body needed was always inside him –
but neither did he
need food, yet he still ate, in moderation
.

‘
I’m not willing to give up food,’ he said, passing around the
cheese he brought from Pirene. ‘It is one of the Three True
Necessities.’

‘
What are the others?’

‘
Warmth,’ he said, ‘and justice.’

He no longer seemed to mind sharing; the cheese would have
turned green if he’d kept it with his cold, frost-covered blankets
any longer, and it was squashed from being in the bag too long.
Yet, following that he fell silent, as if contemplating a difficult
problem that would soon need to be overcome.

~

They
travelled the rest of the day, and they camped several hours after
sundown.As he set the fire going, Caeles told them of his
problem.

‘
I can’t go to São Jantuo.’

Gabel and the magus turned around suddenly. Rowan, who was
sitting nearby watching him make the fire, looked up.

‘
What are you talking about?’ said Gabel.

‘
I’m not allowed to go there.’

‘
Not
allowed
?’

‘
No. The Regent is an enemy of mine. After the Conflict, when I
found out that our new hometowns neighboured, we agreed to stay
away from each other, and signed an agreement. That was many years
ago and if he’s still there – which I’m certain he is – then I
can’t go through the city.’

‘
But the city is right on the lake!’ Gabel pointed out.
‘There’s no other way across.’

Caeles started to rub sticks together, which soon caught.
‘Sorry.’

‘
That isn’t good enough,’ Gabel growled. He took off his hat
and dropped it on a log. ‘You should have warned us
earlier.’

‘
Wouldn’t have made a difference. I’m willing to carry on to
São Jantuo to see if the Mayor is still alive, and if he isn’t the
agreement will be void. It’s only valid until one of us is
dead.’

The magus sat
by Gabel’s dropped fedora, picked it up, and examined its cold
steel rim. ‘And if your old enemy is not yet deceased?’

Caeles shrugged – that annoying little habit of his. ‘Then I
guess I go around. Find another way across, which I’m sure there
must be, seeing as the lake is so big. There must be a private dock
somewhere along the coast beyond the town. There’s miles of
it.’

‘
What if there isn’t? Are we supposed to wait for you on the
other side? You’d be weeks behind us.’

Caeles stoked the fire and seemed to think for a while, his
hand absently pushing the burning logs with a stick. ‘It
has
been a long time.
Maybe he’ll let me through, if he knows the reason.’

‘
How much of an enemy are you to him?’

‘
I killed a lot of his friends,’ Caeles replied quietly. His
eyes closed. ‘But that was ages ago. If he’s still alive then he’s
monstrously old. He wouldn’t pose too much of a problem if it came
to that.’

He looked up
at the others. ‘It would mean a quick pass through the city. No
stops, not even one night.’

‘
That would be impractical,’ said Gabel, ‘but we’ll see when we
get there. Now isn’t the time for creating plans, while the sky
prepares to drop more snow on us. Better we get into our bags
before that.’

They ate
and then
slept
, all waking the next morning to
a fresh blanket of snow. The going became harder then, and Gabel
was glad that at least the winter had come at the start of the
journey, rather than near the end when they would be too exhausted
to manage. At least the snow was thin and sparse; heavy snowfall at
this point would slow them down considerably.

He worried
about other things. In particular, his body was showing strange
signs of some other illness. He knew that his stress was to blame:
he had never enjoyed being around other people. In fact, he
preferred the company of a quiet horse and the twittering birds as
he hunted. His concern for Rowan only made his anxiety worse. That
morning, when rising to consciousness in the snow, he had scratched
his scalp and his fingers returned with a thick lock of dead
hair.

*

Seven

TEAGUE

William Teague, once devout, smelled the burning first. Then
came the stench of bubbling flesh, and his ears, though blocked
with ash like his mouth, could hear screams.

Pain; pain in his eyes … He felt in his sockets and
they
weren’t there
. He let the useless flaps of skin that were his eyelids open
and (somehow still with the power of sight) implored the heavens –
but they were too far away, and neither they nor he could hear his
cries.

He was in a pit. Alive, somehow, and in his human form, not
the monstrous hulk of the theripe. He touched the hole where Joseph
Gabel had shot him and found it clogged with the soot: solid and
immovable. If any of the soot came away onto his fingers, he
couldn’t tell. He was filthy, scarred and burned.

He scrabbled in the grey dustiness of the pit until he
reached its rim, and looked out.

So there was a sky in Hell.

He’d never expected it, never really thought about it. But a
sky there was, black and revolving as if he was inside an eye of a
tornado, looking up. Clouds spun head hundreds of miles above. He
found it easier to think when he wasn’t looking up, and so lowered
his gaze and examined the forsaken landscape around him.

Pain in him and all around him. What on Earth was this place?
For miles and miles, people writhing, screaming … They hung from
huge spiny bushes, like the mice he had seen speared by butcher
birds onto thorns; they hung, chains pulling their feet, from racks
that were made of bloody bones. He saw skulls, alive and screaming.
Some still had the luxury of their eyes, and others even had skin.
They were the lucky ones; some people hung from nooses by the neck,
swinging, choking but never dying; others were lanced by spikes
fixed to the ramparts of huge black-stoned towers, crying out. They
clutched at the bloody spikes through their chests, or groins, or
faces. Every wound was open, raw, wet. All around him:
pain.

Teague was inside a huge courtyard with distant walls on two
sides, taller than the hollowed-out skyscrapers he’d seen as a
child, black and forboding. They were barely visible through the
haze and forest of sharpened steel poles.

Behind him the
courtyard was open, and disappeared into a starless void.

A whorl of shadows swept around him, and he watched them wind
upward from the ground until they were all he could see, making his
dead heart beat like a hammer against his ribs, his dry mouth crack
with fear. The shadow consumed him until his vision accounted for
nothing in such darkness, and it fell inside him, through his
mouth, his eye-less sockets, up his nose, into his ears, and it was
like a new heart within him.

I am Charos
, the shadow told him in
whispers
. I keep this realm.

‘
You are Erebis?’ he asked, referring the Devil of his
near-forgotten youth.

I am his
servant. I harvest.

Teague didn’t need to ask what Charos harvested. He had never
heard of such a creature in the tales. The priest who lived in Niu
Correntia had never said the name before, the name of the
shadow-being in the Devil’s servitude that reaped the new souls,
which filtered through the ether from the world of the living.
Charos was in him now, it
was
him, and yet he knew that simultaneously it was
inside a thousand other souls in this great courtyard, by the two
towers of the castle of Hadentes.

The courtyard of the dead,
it told
him.
Where the souls are
reborn.

Suddenly his thoughts
of injustice were shattered, and pain consumed him. His soul was
being torn into pieces—

You deserve Hell
, Charos said in his
head.
You are Hell. This is where you
belong.

‘
I—’

You deserve Hell
!

The shadow filled him wholly, and he felt his will vanish.
His soul or whatever insubstantial matter he was made up of now
began to dissipate, crack into pieces, and he was multiple-Teague;
four separate shadowmen pulled apart by Charos and encased in
darkness, each equal and the same. Each of them looked at their own
hands and saw smoke and shadow, somehow pulled at by a windless
atmosphere.

They looked up
and Charos stood before them. Clawed feet dug between the stones,
closed wings hung like a cape from its shoulders. It separated
itself and took the four Teagues in different directions. Every
Teague had the same mind, and shared the same eyes.

~

The Tall Tower
, said Charos,
which joins the walls of the castle of
Hadentes.