Retribution Falls (44 page)

The stories said they’d once been human, and they were recognisably so in form and face. But they’d been changed into something else, something that wore human shape uncomfortably, as a skin to contain whatever hid beneath.

The creature before her was scrawny, wearing a tattered shirt and trousers and no shoes at all. Limp black hair was smeared across a pale, wrinkled brow. Its features were twisted out of true. Lips curled to reveal sharp, crooked teeth. It glared at her with eyes that were the yellow and red of bloody pus. Its fingernails were long, dirty and cracked, and it stood low to the ground in a predator’s crouch.

It wasn’t what she saw, but what she sensed that paralysed her: the intuitive knowledge that she was in the presence of something not of this world, something that broke all laws and ruined all the certainties of a thousand generations of knowledge. Her body felt that, and rebelled.

Then it pounced, and bore her into a snowdrift.

She remembered little of what followed. It didn’t seem to make sense when she recalled it later. The Mane had her pinned by the shoulders, and stared into her eyes. Her gaze was locked, as if she were a mouse hypnotised by a snake. She could smell the stench of it, a dead scent like damp leaf mould. Her breathing dropped to a shallow pant.

She felt crushed by the weight of the creature’s will, oppressed by the force in its gaze. By the time she realised something was being done to her, it was too late to resist it. She struggled to oppose the invader with her thoughts, but she couldn’t concentrate. She was losing herself.

She became aware of a change all around her. The blizzard faded, turning ghostly and powerless. The world was darker and sharper all at once. She could see details where there hadn’t been details before: the fine jigsaw of creases in the skin of the Mane’s face; the shocking complexity of its feathery irises.

There was a whispering in the air, a constant hiss of half-spoken words. Movement all around her. She recognised the movement of the Manes, prowling around the town. She could feel them. She shared their motion. And as she sank deeper and deeper into the trance, she felt the warmth of that connection. A sense of belonging, like nothing she’d experienced before, enfolded her. It was beautiful and toxic and sugary and appalling all at once.

She’d almost surrendered herself to it when she was ripped back into reality.

It took a moment for her senses to cope with the change. She was being pulled to her feet by a faceless man in a hooded fur-and-hide coat. Her initial reaction was to pull away, but he held her firmly and said something to her. When she didn’t respond, he said it again, and this time the words got through.

‘—re you alright? Jez? Jez?’

She nodded quickly, because she wanted him to shut up. He was frightening her with his urgent enquiries. The Mane was thrashing and squealing on the ground. A cutlass was buried in the base of its neck, up to the collarbone, half-severing its head. There was little blood, just a clean wound, exposing bone.

But it still wasn’t finished. Moving with jerky, spastic movements, it got its feet under it and tried to stand. Riss swore and kicked it in the face, knocking it flat. He wrenched the cutlass free and beheaded it with a second stroke.

Riss turned away from the corpse of the Mane and looked up at her. He held out his hand: come with me.

Something snapped inside her. The accumulated horror and shock of the attack broke through. She lost her mind and fled.

She ran, through the passageways between the houses, out into the blizzard. The winds pushed and battered her. Snow stuck to her goggles. She could hear Riss calling her name but she ignored him. At some point she realised that she could no longer see any houses, just endless, unmarked snow. She kept running, driven by the terror of what lay behind.

Only when exhaustion drove her to her knees did she stop. She was thoroughly lost, and all traces of her passing were being erased by the fury of the snow. She dared not go back, and she couldn’t go forward. The cold, that she’d barely noticed during her flight, had set in deep. She began to shiver violently. A tiredness overtook her, every bit as insidious and unstoppable as the power of the Manes.

She curled up into a foetal position, and there, buried in the snow, she died.

Every day since, Jez had wondered what might have happened if things had gone another way. If Riss hadn’t saved her. If she’d succumbed to the Mane.

Would it have been so bad, in the end? In that brief moment, when she touched upon the world of the Manes, she’d felt something wonderful. An integration, a togetherness above and beyond anything her human life had given her.

She’d never borne children, never been in love. She’d always dreamed of having friends she could call soulmates, but somehow it never happened. She just didn’t care about them enough, and they didn’t care about her in return. She’d always considered herself rather detached, all in all.

So when she felt the call of the Manes, the primal invitation of the wolf-pack lamenting the absence of their kin, she found it harder and harder to think of reasons to resist.

Yes, they killed; but so had she, now. Yes, they were fearsome; but a fearsome exterior was no indication as to what was beneath. You only had to know the secret of Bess to understand that.

Would the process have been half so frightening if she’d been invited instead of press-ganged? Might she have gone willingly, if only to know what lay beyond that impenetrable wall of fog to the north? Were there incredible lands hidden behind the Wrack, glittering ice palaces at the poles, as the more lurid pulp novels suggested? Was it a wild place, like Kurg with its population of subhuman monsters? Or was there a strange and advanced civilisation there, like Peleshar, the distant and hostile land far to the south-west?

Whatever had been done to her by the Mane that day was incomplete, interrupted by a cutlass to the neck. She was neither fully human nor fully Mane, but somewhere in between. And yet the Manes welcomed her still, beckoned her endlessly, while the humans would destroy her if they knew that she walked their lands without a beating heart.

She never found out what happened to Riss. The morning after she died, she woke up and dug her way out of the snow that had entombed her in the night. The sun shone high in a crystal-blue sky, glittering on distant mounds of white: the roofs of the town. She’d run quite a way in her panic, but it had been in entirely the wrong direction if she’d hoped to reach the safety of the ice caves up on the glacier.

The corpses lay beneath the snow now. Whether Riss was among them, or if he’d been taken, the result was the same. He was gone.

Numb, she searched for survivors and found none. She stood in front of the snow-covered wreck of the aircraft she’d navigated for a year, and felt nothing. Then she found a snow-tractor and began to dig it out.

It took her several days to find another settlement, following charts she’d salvaged. Since she felt perfectly healthy she didn’t question how she’d survived at first. She assumed her snowy tomb had kept her warm. It was only when she was far out in the wilderness that she noticed her heart had stopped. That was when she began to be afraid.

By the time she reached the settlement, she had a story, and a plan.

Keep moving. Keep your secret. Survive, as much as you can be said to live at all.

But it had been a long and lonely three years since that day.

She passed over the southern part of the Hookhollows, their glowing magma vents making bright scribbles in the dark. The Eastern Plateau rose up before her, and she took the Ketty Jay down through the black, filthy clouds. Her engines were robust enough to take a little ash. Once she’d broken through, she brought the Ketty Jay to a few dozen metres above ground level, and skimmed over the Blackendraft flats. She glanced at the navigational charts she was following. Charts that had been meticulously kept by Dracken’s navigator since they’d commandeered the Ketty Jay.

Trust me, she’d said to Frey, when he demanded to know how she was going to fool Dracken’s men into thinking she was dead. The kind of trust he’d shown when he gave her the ignition code to his precious aircraft, the one thing he could be said to love. Even though he was afraid she might steal it and fly off for ever, he’d trusted her.

And he trusted her to come back and save him. She wouldn’t let him down.

She was under no illusion that she was risking her own life, and she knew that even if she succeeded, she’d probably be despised. They couldn’t be her friends. She’d never belong to that crew. If they learned how she was slowly, steadily becoming a Mane, they’d be forced to destroy her. She couldn’t blame them for that.

Yet she’d try anyway. Perhaps afterwards she’d go to the north, to the Manes; but first, she’d try.

It made no sense. But sometimes, humans did things that made no sense.

There was one last thing to do before she set off. Though she’d been lying in the infirmary with all the appearance of a corpse, she’d been wide awake. And she’d heard Dracken’s men talk. Not all the crew of the Ketty Jay had been taken on board the Delirium Trigger.

She slowed the Ketty Jay to a hover and consulted the charts again. She wanted to get this right first time. It was a small challenge to herself. She adjusted the craft’s heading, pushed her on half a klom, then stopped again. When she was satisfied, she engaged the belly lights. The ashen, dusty waste below her was flooded in dazzling light. She smiled.

Damn it, Jez. You’re good.

There, right where they’d left her, was Bess.

Thirty-Four

Malvery’s Story - Something Worse Than Cramp - Frey Goes To The Gallows

Mortengrace, ancestral home of Duke Grephen of Lapin, stood out white among the trees like an unearthed bone. It was set amid the folds and pleats of heavily forested coastal hills in the western arm of the Vardenwood, overlooking the sparkling blue waters of the Ordic Abyssal to the south. High walls surrounded it, enclosing a landing pad for aircraft, expansive gardens and the grand manse where the Duke and his family resided. Among the half-dozen outbuildings were an engineer’s workshop, a barracks for the resident militia and a gaol. The latter was rarely used in these more peaceable times, but it had found employment over the last two days, since Trinica Dracken had delivered six of the most wanted men in Vardia.

Crake sat in his cell, with Malvery and Silo, and he waited. It was all that was left to do now. He waited for the noose.

The cell was small and clean, with stone walls plastered off-white. There were hard benches to sleep on and a barred window, high up, that let in the salty tang of the sea. The temperature was mild on the south coast of Lapin, even in midwinter. A heavy wooden door, banded with iron, prevented their escape. There was a flap at the bottom, through which plates of food were occasionally pushed, and a slot their gaoler used to look in on them.

He was a chatty sort, keen to keep them updated on the details of their imminent demise. Through him, they’d learned that Duke Grephen was at an important conference, and was on his way back just as soon as he could get away and find a judge. ‘To execute the sentence nice and legal,’ the gaoler grinned, drawing out the word ‘execute’ just in case they missed how clever he was being by using it. ‘But don’t you worry. There ain’t no hurry, ’cause not a soul knows you’re here. Nobody’s coming to your rescue.’

There were two guards, in addition to the gaoler, though the prisoners rarely heard them speak. They were there to keep an eye on things. ‘Just in case you try any foolery,’ the gaoler said, with a pointed look at Crake. They’d evidently been warned that there was a daemonist among the prisoners. Crake’s golden tooth would be useless: he couldn’t deal with three men. His skeleton key was lying somewhere in the Ketty Jay’s cargo hold, equally useless.

No way out.

He’d been swallowed by an immense sense of emptiness. It had come upon him in the moment they’d lifted off from the Blackendraft, to be taken on board the Delirium Trigger. The news that the Ketty Jay had disappeared did little to alleviate it. Bess was gone.

His thoughts went to the small whistle, hidden in his quarters aboard the Ketty Jay. Only that whistle, blown by the daemonist who had thralled it, had the power to wake her from oblivion. He’d never get to blow that whistle now. Perhaps that was best.

He should never have tried to save her. In attempting to atone for one crime, he’d committed one far greater. And now she’d be left, neither dead nor alive, for an eternity.

Did she sleep? Was she aware? Was she trapped in a metal shell in the endless waste of the ash flats, unable to move or scream? How much was left of the beautiful child he’d ruined? It was so hard to tell. She was more like a faithful dog than a little girl now, muddled and jumbled by his clumsy transfer, prone to fits of rage, insecurity and animal violence.

He should have let her die, but he couldn’t live with the guilt of it. So he’d made her a monster. And, in doing so, made himself one.

A distant howl made Crake, Silo and Malvery look up as one. The voice was Frey’s, coming from the torture room, just beyond the cell he shared with Pinn and Harkins.

‘They’ve started up again,’ said Malvery. ‘Poor bastard.’

Crake stirred himself. ‘Why’s he bothering to hold out? What does it matter if he signs a confession or not? We’re all going to be just as dead with or without it.’

Malvery grinned beneath his white walrus-like moustache. ‘Maybe he just enjoys being an awkward bugger.’

Silo actually smiled at that. Crake didn’t take up the humour. He felt Malvery put a huge arm round his shoulder.

‘Cheer up, eh? You’ve had a face like a soggy arse since Dracken caught us.’

Crake gave him an amazed look. ‘You know, all my life I’ve been under the illusion that the fear of death was a common, almost universal part of being human. But recently I’ve come to think I’m the only one on this crew who is actually worried about it in the slightest.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. I bet the other cell is half-full of Harkins’ shit by now, he’s so scared,’ Malvery said with a wink. ‘Then again, he’s afraid of just about everything. The only reason he’s still a pilot is because he’s more afraid of not being a pilot than he is of getting shot down.’