The Blood Debt (36 page)

Skender struggled to think. Only five people in the world knew that his true name was Galeus: his father, his mother, Sal and Shilly, and a girl he’d had a crush on two years earlier. The golem in the Haunted City had used it, but a golem wasn’t human so it didn’t count. There was only one other, and Skender wasn’t sure if that counted as human or not.

Your name is Galeus. We weren’t part of this world, then.

Through the chaos of the Homunculus’s face, Skender made out confusion and indecision — and something else. The Homunculus radiated a sense of weariness so powerful that for a moment Skender forgot the throbbing bruises on his back, shoulders and face.

Certainty filled him, then. As crazy as it seemed, he
had
met this creature before.

The one from the Void,
the man’kin had told him, in the Divide.

‘You’re the Oldest One,’ he breathed. ‘I met you in the Void Beneath. What are you doing
here?’

The Homunculus shook its head in a blur of motion. Features smeared and overlapped with frightening rapidity. ‘The Void wipes everything clean. You can’t possibly remember.’

‘I remember everything! You told me about the Cataclysm and the twins who caused it. One of them died, you said, and something happened. The world fell apart — or came back together — but you didn’t remember which one of the twins you were. You —’ He stopped, then. ‘Goddess. You’re
both
of them!’

‘I —’ The Homunculus quivered like someone having a fit. ‘We — we are lost. So much time has passed. Nothing is the same. What
is
this place? Who are these people?’

Skender stared at it, finally seeing past the monstrosity to the strange truth beneath. The Homunculus was two people at once — two bodies in one, blending and merging in a constant flow of limbs and features. Sometimes the two bodies acted in accord, giving the appearance of just one person, albeit slightly blurry. Other times, there was no common ground, and they devolved into chaos.

It —
they
— were trapped in the Homunculus.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked. ‘Does this mean we’re about to have another Cataclysm?’

The Homunculus reared away, at war with itself, and fell, unable to coordinate all its limbs at once.

As it thrashed on its back like a bug trying to turn over, Kemp called to Skender, his voice thick with worry. ‘What’s happening in there? Are you hurt?’

Skender managed to stand, although his back screamed with the effort. His cheek was swollen and dead to the touch. A mental numbness threatened to creep over him, as it had after the crash with Chu. He fought it with all his strength.

‘I don’t know what’s happening, Kemp. I don’t know what to do.’

‘Just stay away from it. Keep out of reach and maybe it won’t hurt you.’

‘I’m not worried about that.’ He passed a hand across his face. ‘Something odd’s going on, but I don’t know what it is.’

A low groan came from one of the other cages. Skender ran to the bars and peered through at his mother, who was stirring. He went to call to her, but stopped his tongue. Pirelius was bound to have someone listening in to see what happened with the Homunculus. The last thing Skender wanted to do was to give the bandit leader any extra information.

I’m not an idiot, you know,
Pirelius had said,
although
she
might treat me like one.

His mother went still again. He turned away. The distraction had given him an idea.

Kemp didn’t seem to know what the Homunculus was, but what if he really
did?
He would feign ignorance, just as Skender would try to keep secret from Pirelius that his mother was also one of the captive. If Kemp
did
know, then it was possible that the people the Homunculus had intended to rendezvous with were Skender’s mother and her expedition, not Pirelius and his gang. That would solve several mysteries quite neatly, since Pirelius appeared to have captured the Homunculus, not conspired with it, and the Homunculus didn’t even know who Pirelius was.

When we come back,
his mother had said,
we’ll have found something wonderful...

For the life of him, though, Skender couldn’t work out how to use the information to his advantage.

The Homunculus stood quivering in the shadows, watching him silently. Its combined form had stabilised. Now Skender merely felt as if his eyeballs were vibrating every time he looked at it.

‘Why are you here?’ he asked the twins. ‘What do you want?’

‘There’s something we have to do,’ the Homunculus said — and now that he was listening properly, Skender could hear that the odd discordant tone to the voice came from two voices speaking not quite at the same time. ‘But it’s been so long. Our memories are only slowly returning.’ One hand touched its chest, where Skender could faintly make out a strange mark. ‘We were protected. The Ogdoad marked us. The devachan couldn’t erase us completely. We made it this far. Now it’s all going to start again.’

‘What’s going to start?’

‘Our life,’ said the Homunculus. ‘Our lives, and perhaps our deaths. The future is flexible. This world-line is diverging even as we speak, so we have to hurry. We have to get out of here. Now!’

The Homunculus took a step forward. Skender raised his hands in a placating gesture as the form before him began to disintegrate again.

‘Believe me,’ he said, ‘I want to get out of here as badly as you do. But yelling’s not going to help anyone. We have to
think.’

‘I’ve had nothing to do
but
think,’ said Kemp from his cage on the far side of the room, ‘and a fat lot of good that’s done anyone.’

‘Yes, but you didn’t have me with you, then.’ Skender pushed the pain and exhaustion to one side and forced himself to concentrate. There had to be something they could do from within the cages, instead of wait — perhaps hopelessly — for rescue. The stick at his feet was patently useless against Pirelius, but that might not be his only weapon.

He looked at the Homunculus. ‘You have no reason to trust me,’ he whispered, ‘but I think we can work together to get us all out of here. Are you willing to give it a try?’

The Homunculus nodded. ‘We don’t have much choice.’

‘That’s the way I see it.’ Skender held out a hand. ‘Let’s shake on it. No, just one of you,’ he said when both right hands came up in rough synchrony.

The arm split into two. ‘It won’t work,’ the twins protested. ‘We’ve tried.’

Skender went to take the proffered hand. His fingers slid through the shadowy limb as though it wasn’t even there.

‘Yes.’ Skender felt relief as his hand retreated. ‘I was hoping that might happen.’

* * * *

Sal and Kail hurried through cramped tunnels, taking great care to pause at each intersection lest they stumble across someone who would sound the alarm. Thus far they hadn’t seen a soul.

Kail went first, lighting the way with a small pocket-mirror and directing Sal with hand signals. The tunnels were ancient and dirty: many of them had flexed and split with the shifting stone around them, forming odd intersections and dead ends where none had obviously been intended. Sal saw evidence that people had been using the tunnels for a long time in the form of dark patches on the walls where hands had pressed for balance, graffiti both proud and profane, and rubbish. The stink of human occupation became steadily stronger, until Sal quite lost the musky scent of the tracker ahead of him.

Twice Kail ducked his head too late to avoid banging it on collapsed ceilings and unexpected lintels. His step was surprisingly light, given his size. He cursed just once, when a stone slipped under his foot and his knee caught a sharp outcrop. Sal, the smaller and clumsier of the two, had to frequently swallow gasps of pain. He could see why the tortuous route was kept only for emergency exits, not everyday traffic.

As they wound deeper into the bedrock, Sal noticed that his sense of the Change was becoming increasingly distant. The last shreds of his connection to the living flows of the world were being muffled.

‘Can you feel it?’ he asked Kail.

The tracker nodded. ‘We’re coming closer to the heart of the Change-sink.’

‘The mysterious “sink room”, perhaps.’

‘Let’s find out.’

Their pace slowed to a bare creep. Kail extinguished the pocket-mirror. A faint pinkish glow came from the end of the tunnel. Sal paid close attention to his physical senses. If there was someone waiting for them, they were silent, and much cleaner than the lookout.

Kail paused at the entrance for several breaths, watching and listening closely, then waved Sal forward.

‘What do you make of this?’

Sal edged over the threshold by degrees. The room consisted of little more than a cave with rough floor, ceiling and walls. The air hung thick and heavily within it, despite two other entrances that opened from the far side. The pink glow came from a fat stalagmite that crouched to one side, its flanks creamy and smooth, and perfectly dry. The source of the light wasn’t the stone, but many knuckle-shaped objects embedded in the stone, like fragments of glass stuck in a slumped candle. They came in several sizes, from a baby’s fist up to a melon. Sal circled the stalagmite to get a better look. In the utter heart of the Change-sink, his eyes strained to make out any detail at all.

‘What is this made of?’ he asked. ‘Bone?’

‘They’re glowing,’ stated Kail unnecessarily. The pink light was actually many different shades mixed together, including blues, greens and purples.

‘It looks like opal.’ Sal reached out a finger to touch one of the objects, but pulled back with a hiss. The tip of his finger had gone numb.

‘I’ve seen fossils made of opal before.’ Kail’s eyes traced out the curve made by the objects in the stone. ‘This could have been the spine of a snake, perhaps. A sea-snake.’

‘Maybe. What it is
now
concerns me more.’

‘Definitely the heart of the sink.’

‘I think so too.’

‘Perhaps we should break it.’ Kail reached into his pack and pulled out a knife. ‘We need an advantage, and this might just provide us with one.’

He worried at one of the smaller fragments at the base of the stalagmite, forcing the blade into the soft limestone and wriggling it back and forth. The blade bent, but nothing gave.

‘Try that one,’ said Sal, pointing. ‘There’s a crack. See it?’

Kail shifted his attention to the fragment Sal suggested. The blade slipped into the crack and immediately popped out a section of stone. Progress was swift from there. With a grunt of satisfaction, Kail scooped out a thumb-sized opalescent jewel into one hand and held it up to his eye.

‘Still glowing.’

And the sink was undiminished. ‘Oh, well. Worth a try.’

‘Maybe if we give it some distance —’

The sound of footsteps came from one of the other entrances, quickly followed by voices. Kail grabbed Sal’s arm and hurried him into the smallest of the tunnel mouths. The finger he held to his lips was lit by the fragment still in his hand. The light then disappeared into one of his pockets. Kail shook his fingers to bring the circulation back.

‘— should have been watching the east side,’ the louder of the two voices was saying as it grew nearer. ‘Find him and tell him I said to get his act together. We haven’t got time to fuck around.’

‘And if I don’t find him?’

‘Then you make sure whatever happened to him doesn’t happen to you as well. Is that clear enough for you?’

‘Yes, Pirelius.’

Two men entered the sink room. There they split up. One, the smaller of the two, took the corridor Sal and Kail had come down. The other brushed past the entrance in which Sal and Kail were hiding and took the remaining way. Two sets of heavy footsteps receded in different directions.

‘The enterprising Pirelius.’ Kail’s voice was little more than an exhalation. ‘According to the directions our friend gave us, he’s heading for the dungeon.’

‘We’d better follow, then.’

‘Keep an eye on our tail. I don’t want that other guy doubling back and catching us.’

Sal nodded. They trailed Pirelius to the place where the lookout had said the others were being kept. Their progress was rapid. Sal was acutely conscious of how visible they were from either end of the long, straight tunnel. Voices came from ahead. Kail slowed as they approached it.

‘Planning something?’ Pirelius bellowed at some hapless lackey. ‘Of course they’ll
try,
but what do you think they’re going to do, exactly? They don’t have the Change; they don’t have any weapons; two of them can barely even stand. The most they can hope for is that you’ll do something else stupid and give them a chance. Now get in there and find out what’s happened to the boy!’

Sal heard a shove and the scuffle of feet on dirt. He and Kail reached the entranceway in time to see Pirelius following a pigtailed man out of a small antechamber into what was obviously the dungeon proper. The air was thick with smoke, but that couldn’t hide the odour of human degradation. The antechamber contained several tables and cabinets. Items scattered on the tables had a horrible look about them: leather stained with brown splatters; corroded metal tools ending in sharp hooks and points.

A conversation ensued in the dungeon. Sal couldn’t make out the barked orders, but he did recognise a voice speaking in response.

‘Skender’s in there,’ Sal hissed. ‘We have to get him out.’

Kail nodded. ‘We can either pull back and plan something for later, or jump them now. There are only two of them, after all.’

‘That we know of.’

‘And they might be armed.’ The tracker’s expression was torn. ‘I don’t like this situation one bit. We’re exposed here and at a disadvantage. We can’t take too long to decide.’

Something niggled at Sal, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. ‘I think we should have a plan before barging in. We don’t want to get ourselves trapped.’

Kail nodded again. ‘Right. Timing is the better part of triumph.’

They retreated up the tunnel, Sal forcing himself not to think that he was abandoning his friend. They would return for Skender just as soon as it was safe to do so. ‘Safe’ being a highly relative term, of course. He and Kail had infiltrated right into the heart of enemy territory. They were significantly outnumbered, and only Kail had anything like the experience required. If only, Sal thought, they could call for help.