The Blood Debt (25 page)

Sal seemed more amused than irritated by Skender’s oversight. ‘I knew if we banged our heads together long enough we’d think of something.’

Skender averted his eyes as he took the licence back from Sal and placed it on his chest. Sal had changed since they’d last met, he mused, and it wasn’t just the long hair and the stubble on his chin. He had become surer of himself, more confident. As a teenager, he had been stricken with guilt and conflicted at almost every turn. A smouldering, frustrated rage had seemed to fill him, keen for an outlet.

That rage appeared to have been tamed. Skender wondered how.

‘Tell me about you and Shilly,’ he said as the black disorientation swept over him again. ‘It’s good to see you guys together.’

‘We’re good,’ Sal said. ‘Very good.’

‘Still living in that little town, in that old workshop?’

‘Still there. Life has been quiet these last few years. It’s made a nice change.’

Skender could appreciate that. ‘At least you’re not towing a couple of sprogs along behind you. That’d make things a little inconvenient.’

Sal laughed. ‘Kids aren’t an option for a while yet. We’re still young. There’s so much left to do.’

‘Like what?’

A shrug was his only answer.

‘Fair enough. Rescuing your father and my mother is enough to start with.’ Skender stood up on aching legs and looked around. Sal’s breath bloomed like smoke from his mouth. ‘Let’s go topside and see what I can see.’

They clambered up the dry riverbank and peered over the edge. The air currents on the ground looked very different to Skender. Flows coiled back on themselves in complicated ways as they hit stone; everywhere he looked he saw turbulence. It was like trying to pick out a clear patch on the far side of a wheat field without standing up.

He refused to be discouraged. ‘I think there might be something that way,’ he said, pointing in the rough direction they were headed.

‘That’s convenient.’

‘Wishful thinking, maybe.’

They dropped down again and kept walking. Sal asked Skender about his father, and he explained that Skender Van Haasteren the Ninth hadn’t changed at all since Sal and Shilly had visited the Keep. Tall and severe, his life consisted entirely of terrorising students — who seemed to idolise him — and occasionally arguing with bureaucrats from Ulum.

Even as he said the words, he remembered with a pang of homesickness the last time he had seen his father.

Go now. Forget about your homework. Some things are simply more important.

He shivered at the realisation that his father was a real person, with fears and desires the same as anyone.

They stopped an hour later, with the sun directly overhead. It seemed to be taking them forever to reach the Aad, and he wondered if it was all an illusion. Perhaps the crash-landing with Chu had been harder than he realised, and he was lying unconscious in the dirt, only dreaming that he had met old friends- and was off on a new adventure. Dream or not, he sipped cautiously from the water bottle and handed it to Sal. His stomach was beginning to anticipate lunch.

On the far side of the Divide, miners swooped and circled in ever-expanding circles. Once in a while, one would fly over their position. Skender considered waving, but decided to keep walking. The flyers were searching for artefacts — not that Skender had seen anything in the way of treasure since landing — and weren’t likely to help him in his quest.

Thus far, they hadn’t seen anything truly weird, and that struck him as very weird indeed. His nervousness increased rather than decreased as time passed and nothing burst out of the ground to steal him away.

‘What’s that?’ asked Sal, when next they climbed up for a look.

‘I don’t know.’ It was hard to see through the coiling winds. In the distance, clouds of brown air were rising from the valley floor. ‘Dust?’

‘That’d be my bet. I wonder what’s kicking it up.’

‘Doesn’t look like a sandstorm.’ And it didn’t.

The air in that direction appeared no different to the air around them.

‘Must be something on the ground then.’ Sal put the mystery aside for the moment. ‘Any sign of the Homunculus?’

Skender shook his head. He was beginning to regret landing so soon. If they had stayed aloft a little longer, maybe they could have caught sight of their quarry and saved themselves a long, possibly fruitless trek. Already he had become used to an aerial perspective. It was so hard to see anything from zero elevation.

But he didn’t regret landing safely. That had been a major achievement. They could have broken their legs or skulls if he had waited and tried later, only to screw it up.

They picked up the wing and kept walking. There was nothing else to do.

* * * *

Sal cocked his head, catching the faintest echo of a chimerical engine snarling behind him. It was hard to locate the source. He assumed it was Shilly and the wardens descending the southern wall of the Divide preparatory to crossing it. How they were doing it, precisely, he didn’t know, but he wished them well.

There was another sound beneath it, one that had been growing steadily louder since their last rest stop. A faint rumble just under the edge of his hearing, he had at first thought he was imagining it. Now, however, the echo of Shilly and the others had allowed it to be separated out from other sounds, and it could no longer be ignored.

He stopped Skender. ‘Do you hear that?’

His friend cocked one ear and frowned. ‘No. What?’

Skender couldn’t be deaf at such a young age, so Sal assumed that the licence was stealing from one sense in order to bolster another. ‘I think we need to take another look.’

They inched over the top of the crumbling bank and gasped at what they saw.

An army was walking along the bottom of the Divide. That was Sal’s first impression. The cloud he and Skender had glimpsed an hour earlier, now even larger and thicker, was being kicked up by hundreds of feet marching heavily on the dirt. The combined sound of so many footfalls caused the rumble he heard. He could make out few individuals in the crowd marching towards him, but he could tell one thing very clearly.

‘They’re man’kin,’ he breathed.

‘Are you sure?’ asked Skender.

He nodded, not quite daring to believe it himself. He had never seen this number of man’kin in one place before. He didn’t know so many existed in the entire
world.
But he couldn’t discount the evidence of his own eyes, and they told him that several hundred stone creatures were approaching the creek’s winding path along the bottom of the Divide. If he and Skender didn’t get out of the way, they were going to be in a lot of trouble.

The impression of an army quickly faded. The mass of man’kin weren’t walking in ordered columns or in step. They weren’t wearing uniforms, and weren’t even of uniform size, shape or colour. Some looked passably human, in the form of monarchs and soldiers, with only the cold granite of their flesh and raiment to reveal their extraordinary natures. Others had human bodies with grimacing animal faces or extra limbs, or were incomplete, being torsos or busts carried by their more mobile companions. This detail surprised Sal, as the man’kin called Mawson had once vehemently declared that
“Kin never carries ‘kin.’
To see them breaking that rule was an extraordinary thing.

Stone animals — horses, elephants, lions, and camels among them — travelled as equals alongside grotesque gargoyles and mythical creatures. Some of the stone shapes were enormous, giant lumbering forms that seemed fashioned to no plan at all.

Their heavy tread vibrated under Sal’s fingertips where he clung to the side of the riverbank. Close up, the unruly march would sound like an avalanche.

‘Where are they going?’ Skender asked.

Sal didn’t know, but it looked to him like they were following the Divide westwards, away from the Aad. They certainly didn’t appear to be crossing the Divide, given that they were drawing closer, not heading to Sal’s left, where distant Laure lay on the far side of the mighty canyon.

‘Maybe this is normal,’ he said. ‘Maybe this happens all the time around here.’

Skender looked doubtful. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t know. We can either lie low and hope they don’t see us, or run and hide somewhere else.’ Even as he considered the second option, he remembered the wing they carried between them. It would be hard to make any sort of speed unless they left it behind.

Skender’s charmed eyes scanned the landscape from their low-lying position, looking for an alternative place to shelter. There wasn’t much that Sal could see: a few weatherworn rocks, some jagged splits in the baked topsoil, and the withered, twisted trunk of a long-dead tree. Perhaps, he thought desperately, the man’kin were too heavy to run quickly.

Skender’s gaze caught on a detail to his right, then backtracked. ‘Look!’

‘Where? At what?’

‘Oh, I forgot. You won’t be able to see it.’ His index finger indicated a patch of empty ground. ‘The Homunculus went that way. I can follow its wake in the air, just as you said!’

Any excitement Sal felt at having finally caught the trail of the Homunculus was quashed by the lack of cover in that particular area. If they stayed put, the trail might fade before the vast crowd of man’kin passed; if they ran for it, the man’kin would see them and ...

Sal didn’t know what would come after that. The decision came down to how much he was prepared to risk: losing the trail again or being attacked by hundreds of creatures made of animated but decidedly solid stone.

Then a point that should have been obvious occurred to him.

He dropped down from his perch and pulled Skender after him. ‘This is what we’re going to do,’ he said. ‘We’re going to run for the wake as fast as we can, and we’re going to do it now, before the man’kin get any closer.’

Skender’s face reflected his own previous uncertainties back at him. ‘But won’t that get us killed?’

‘Not if we run fast enough,’ he said, ‘and get to the wake before they do. The man’kin can’t survive without the Change. If they try to cross the wake, they’ll go back to being nothing but statues.’

Skender nodded. ‘Nice one.’

Together they hauled the wing to a section of the creek bed that would be easier to scale. They would have to move quickly once spotted to avoid being squashed, crushed or any of the other gruesome fates Sal imagined would befall them if the man’kin caught up too soon.

‘Ready?’ he asked as they poised themselves to climb and then run.

Skender nodded, a nervous excitement in his eyes. Sal wondered if Skender’s throat was as dry as his was.

‘Okay. Let’s do it.’

They scrambled out of the dry creek, dragging the wing after them. The man’kin assembly looked much larger than it had before; a vast throng lay behind the foremost ranks that hadn’t been visible from so low to the ground. Sal began to have second thoughts, even as Skender pointed to where he had seen the wake, but it was too late to turn back. Blank stone eyes were swivelling to focus on them. A cry went up. More giant heads swung around. The rumbling of stone feet became thunderously loud.

Sal ran, following Skender across the pebble-strewn ground, heading across the face of the man’kin horde towards the canyon wall. He couldn’t see the wake so he didn’t know how far away salvation lay. All he could do was try to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the monsters lumbering in their direction.

He risked a glance over his shoulder. A slender statue more than two metres tall, with skinny arms, tapering fingers and slitted eyes, led a motley pack of nightmarish creatures that ran, rolled, leapt and pounced towards the two fleeing humans. The crunching of stones under their heavy tread sounded like fire tearing through saltbush, and Sal knew that if they caught him the result would be just as deadly.

‘Is it much further?’ he yelled at Skender, feeling his breath beginning to burn in his lungs.

‘Almost there! Run faster!’

‘I’m running as fast as I can!’ Sal put his head down and concentrated on moving his legs. If he didn’t expend energy worrying about what was behind him, he told himself, then he would have more to spare getting away from it. The theory was flawed, but as long as it worked Sal could live with it.

He almost pulled it off.

Skender scrambled up a low rise and slipped on a bed of smoothly polished stones. The wing jutted into Sal’s solar plexus, winding him. As he shifted it to a new position he felt a cold stone limb clutch at the back of his neck, and he ducked instinctively.

Ducking and running at the same time was too much for his balance to cope with. He too slipped on the pebbles and went down. A forest of heavy legs instantly surrounded him, stamping and kicking, and missing his soft flesh by bare centimetres. He curled into a ball and put his hands over his head.

‘Sal!’ Skender yelled at him from outside the granite forest.

‘Don’t stop!’ he shouted back. ‘Keep running!’

‘But I’m here! You can make it!’

Sal peered through his fingers at Skender, just visible beyond his assailants’ legs. He was standing on a seemingly unremarkable patch of sand just metres away. The marks of the licence had completely faded. As hoped, the man’kin were leaving Skender completely alone.

‘Quick!’ Skender shouted. ‘Come on!’

But Skender couldn’t see what Sal could. The man’kin were fighting among themselves, presumably for the right to squash him to a pulp. Sand and fragments of stone covered him as the strange creatures collided mightily with each other, cracking and splintering with every kick and punch. The air was thick with the Change.

‘The human enslaves us!’
roared one of them, its voice heard as much through Sal’s head as through his ears.

‘It freed Mawson,’
said another, deflecting a blow that would have pulverised his left leg.
‘It does not need to die.’

‘It does not need to live!’

Sal rolled to one side. A broad foot cracked the ground where his head had just been. The leg of one of his defenders brushed him by accident, flinging him aside as easily as a rag doll.