Terminal World (20 page)

‘Do you understand me?’ he asked.

‘He understands you. Just won’t admit to it.’

Quillon shrugged - he had no reason to doubt her. ‘I don’t know if you have any idea what’s happened. There’s been a zone storm. Worse than anything in recent experience. Spearpoint ... well, you can’t have missed that.’

‘Spearpointer,’ the trapped rider said, and then, despite his evident discomfort, managed to spit in Quillon’s face. Quillon wiped away the pink-tinged foam. ‘Fuck you, Spearpointer. Die like rest of us. Soon.’

The man spat again, but this time it was weaker and his aim less effective. The spit splashed back onto his beard, lying there like a slug trail. The man groaned, unable to hide his pain.

‘How long do you think he’s been lying here?’ Quillon asked.

‘Long enough,’ she said, touching the fallen horse. ‘It’s cold. Couple hours at least, with him under it.’

‘You’re going to die,’ Quillon told the man. ‘Even if you didn’t have zone sickness, that horse has almost certainly been on you for too long. It’s cut off your circulation. Toxins have accumulated in your blood, trapped in your legs. If I were to release the pressure on you, those toxins would be released, and you’d die.’

The man wheezed and made a kind of death-mask smile. ‘You too.’

‘Yes, you were saying. The thing is, I can take some of your pain away.’ Quillon could barely drag his eyes off the dying Skullboy, so his hands had to dig through the medical kit unassisted.

‘Don’t you go giving him no precious medicines,’ Meroka said.

‘I’ll give him what I see fit.’ He found a vial of granulated Morphax- 55, recognising it by its shape. ‘Open your mouth,’ he told the man.

The Skullboy widened his lips, revealing a cave entrance of sharpened and metal-capped teeth, through which emerged a hellish, kitchen-waste stench of rotting meat and vegetables. His tongue had been split into two, the double-pronged end probing between his teeth.

‘I’m going to put this under your tongue,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no pain. Will you let me do that?’

‘Making a big mistake,’ Meroka said.

The Skullboy lifted his tongue, inviting Quillon to administer the Morphax-55. He thought of just tipping the bottle in and hoping for the best, but that was wasteful and would risk contaminating the bottle itself. Instead he cupped his left hand and poured out what he judged to be a sufficient number of pills. He would take away the Skullboy’s pain, both from the horse and the zone sickness, and ease his passing, and feel that he had done some small measure of good, however insignificant the act was when set against the unthinkable misery playing out around him. Using the fingers of his right hand, he pinched at the pills with his thumb and forefinger until he had about half of them, as many as he could carry in one go, and transferred that quantity to the Skullboy’s mouth. The tongue was still elevated, flexing and questing in a vile way, but permitting him to deposit the pills. Then he went back for the rest, and was placing them when the Skullboy clamped down his teeth hard on Quillon’s fingers, the agony instant and exquisite, sharpened teeth and edged metal cutting flesh to the bone, crunching into the bone itself, threatening to sever his thumb and forefinger. Quillon let out a yelp of surprise and pain. With his right hand still trapped in the Skullboy’s mouth, he snatched at the angel gun with his left. He jammed the barrel against the Skullboy’s forehead and jerked the trigger. Nothing happened, so he tried again, with the Skullboy still biting down on his fingers. But the gun was dead. In a berserk fury he grabbed hold of the barrel instead and started hammering the grip against the Skullboy’s head, grunting with pain and exertion, knowing nothing but fury and the need to murder another human being. The gun cracked against bone, and on the fifth or sixth swing he felt something give way under the skin, the skull beginning to fracture, and at that same moment there was a bang, concussive and vast as if the world itself had just cracked open, and the Skullboy’s mouth turned slack. Quillon staggered away, blood already welling up from the wounds in his fingers, dropping the angel gun, barely able to look at what Meroka had to done to the Skullboy’s head.

He saw enough. Meroka had emptied several barrels of the volley-gun in one go, at practically point-black range. Little remained of the Skullboy’s head except for his jaw. Brain and bone sprayed away on either side, plastered onto the road in the shape of an obscene, pinkish-grey butterfly.

‘Could’ve told you that was going to end in tears,’ Meroka said.

Quillon dug into his medical kit with his good hand until he found a bottle of disinfectant. He passed it to Meroka. ‘Open this for me.’

‘Please.’

‘Just open the damned ... thing.’

‘Hey,’ she said, sounding impressed. ‘The doctor has his limits after all.’ She unscrewed the cap, extracted the wadding from the top and passed the bottle back to Quillon. Without preamble he splashed it over his fingers, the blood still gushing from the wounds, the sting of the disinfectant like liquid fire where it touched.

‘Damn,’ Quillon said, but this time in response to the pain, not his irritation with Meroka. He poured more, and this time almost passed out as the antiseptic fluid penetrated the wounds, sinking its own chemical teeth into his flesh.

‘You need someone to stitch those cuts?’ Meroka asked.

‘No.’ He forced authority into his voice, even though he was almost weeping. ‘Cut a length off those bandages. At the bottom of the case.
Please.’

To her credit she was fast and efficient, shouldering the volley-gun while she worked, scissoring off a strip of bandage, cutting the strip into two and helping him wrap one strip around his thumb and the other around the index and forefinger, so that he could still retain some use of his hand.

‘Pins in the upper compartment,’ Quillon said.

Meroka secured the bandages, and then did something Quillon hadn’t been expecting, which was to pat him on the shoulder, almost maternally. ‘Sorry for the lecture. Guess it was surplus to requirements.’

‘Somewhat.’

‘You going to be all right?’

‘Given our circumstances, I suspect I’ll be doing very well if it’s this wound that kills me.’

‘Still need to keep an eye on it - fuckers’ve been known to keep dead meat lodged ’twixt their teeth, turning rotten, just so’s they can poison people when they bite.’

‘Information that, strangely enough, you neglected to mention earlier.’

‘You’re the doctor. Guess I just assumed you knew what you were doing.’ She dug into her coat and produced a small pistol. ‘Take this. I think you’ve about exhausted the possibilities with the angel gun, unless you’re planning to shove it down someone’s throat and choke them with it.’

Quillon took the pistol awkwardly with his bandaged hand.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

 

They walked on.

Meroka reloaded the volley-gun as she strolled, one of the burning wagons looming ahead, its wooden and fabric skin all but consumed, leaving only a sagging metal frame that was itself beginning to succumb to the fire. The frame, Quillon realised, was one of the cages they had seen when the caravan passed. The blazing heat from the other wagons was now almost unbearable, but he held his bandaged hand up to shield his face, gun pocketed so that he could carry his bag, and advanced as close as he dared. Meroka was only a little way ahead, shielding her own face with one hand and holding the volley-gun in the other.

‘They got out,’ she called, above the roar and hiss of the fire. ‘Door’s open.’

‘You think someone let them leave?’

‘Could be, if there was anyone around who wasn’t already blacking out.’

‘Someone other than the Skullboys, you mean?’

‘Yeah. Or they all just broke out. Amazing what you’ll do when burning to death is a real possibility.’

Quillon nodded, although - having seen how secure the cages looked - he doubted that any amount of adrenalin-fuelled strength would have made enough of a difference to the captives. It was much more likely they had been freed by bystanders, locals with a grudge against the Skullboys.

‘I hope all of them got out.’

Meroka walked on a little further, pushing the volley-gun’s barrel ahead of her, then said, ‘These two certainly didn’t.’

The wagon in question had come to rest in the ditch at the roadside, sufficiently far from the other vehicles that the flames had, at least until recently, managed to avoid it. Its rear wheels were now ablaze, the spokes columned in fire, tongues of flame beginning to lick along its chassis. Before very long the whole thing would be alight, the fire engulfing the cage resting on its back. For now, though, the flames had yet to reach the cage and the two people inside it were still alive.

It was the woman and child. Quillon remembered the birthmark on the back of the woman’s head, and then she turned to face him. She was exactly as he remembered her from the night before: the same tattered, sleeveless dress, the same combination of thinness and hard-earned strength, the same hairless head. She was staring right at him, and the child - could have been a girl or a boy - was still at her side. He expected the woman to say something, to call out to them and ask to be freed, but instead she just kept on staring, her deep-set eyes emotionless and her strong jaw clenched in resignation, as if she had long ago reconciled herself to never leaving the cage. Even the child - a girl, Quillon decided - had a look of defiant acceptance, as if she had been studying her mother intently, learning to stare at the world with the same blazing refusal to show weakness.

‘Why didn’t anyone let them out?’ Quillon asked, as Meroka slowed, aiming the volley-gun directly at the cage.

‘I know,’ Meroka said, before stopping and turning back to look at him.

‘Are you going to tell me?’

Meroka raised the gun until it was pointed right at the woman. ‘Turn around.’

The woman did nothing. Her expression registered only the tiniest shift, to a kind of imperious disdain.

‘I said, turn the fuck around.’ Meroka altered her aim slightly. ‘Do it, or I put a hole through the sprat.’

The child gave no sign of being in any way alarmed by having the volley-gun pointed right at her head. Either she was too backwards or uneducated to understand the significance of the gesture, or she was heroically brave.

‘Finger’s getting twitchy,’ Meroka said.

The woman seemed to consider, then turned slowly around so that she had her back to Quillon and his companion. He could see the birthmark much more clearly now, the woman’s hairless skull bathed in flickering orange from the nearby fires.

Except it wasn’t a birthmark. Or at least no birthmark Quillon had ever seen with his own eyes. It was far too regular, far too precise and geometric to be the work of nature: more like a tattoo or a brand, a mark of ownership or fealty. It was a five-pointed star, with circular dots at the tip of each point.

‘She’s a witch,’ Meroka said. ‘That’s what it means.’

‘There are no such things as witches,’ Quillon said, but with rather less certainty than he might have wished.

‘Maybe not. But there are such things as tectomancers. That’s what we’re looking at here.’

‘Are you certain?’

‘I know the score, Cutter. She’s got the mark. Makes her one of them.’

Quillon didn’t know what to think. Until leaving Spearpoint, he had never been required to have an opinion on the existence or otherwise of tectomancers. He knew that they were poised somewhere on the brink between myth and reality; dismissed as superstition by some, accepted as a real phenomenon - albeit frightening, rarely encountered and misunderstood - by others. On consideration he would probably have admitted to accepting their reality, while balancing that acceptance with a grave scepticism as to the actual scope and efficacy of their powers. There was simply too much scholarship to dismiss tectomancers as a fiction, something made up to frighten children and the superstitious, and yet within that scholarship their gifts had almost certainly been exaggerated, blown out of all proportion by fearful witnesses and avid retellers of second-hand experience. At no point, though, had Quillon expected to actually encounter one. Even if one accepted their reality, and that some of the powers credited to them were real, it was still a given that tectomancers were exotically rare. It was said that they were born to normal mothers, mothers who did not carry the mark of the baubled star. Just as some diseases only manifested when ill-fated parents met and produced a child - the causative factor carried silently by mother and father - so a tectomancer could be presumed to be the result of inherited influences that had lurked undetected in previous generations. But tectomancy was something other than a disease. Tectomancers might not have long life expectancies, but that wasn’t because of their condition bestowing any systematic infirmity. It was because they tended to be hounded to early deaths, often involving stones or pyres. They were, in other words, regarded exactly like witches.

And he appeared to be staring at one.

‘Do you believe?’ he asked Meroka.

‘It don’t matter whether I do or don’t, Cutter. What matters is what the Skullboys and the halfwit fucking inbreeds who live out here believe. And to them there’s no doubt at all. She’s a walking bad omen. Something you lock up in a cage and set fire to. That’s why no one let her out. Too chickenshit to face the consequences of freeing her.’

The woman turned slowly back to face them. Something in the regal bearing of her posture disarmed all Quillon’s assumptions - it was like watching a fashion model turn around after displaying some fabulously expensive item of high couture. She was inside the cage, but the thin woman in the ragged dress still seemed to have a subtle power beyond her confinement.

‘But we’re not chickenshit,’ Quillon said, noticing that the fire had advanced since their arrival, now beginning to lick at the bottom of the cage. ‘We can let them out. Someone has to.’