The Modern World (2 page)

‘Jant!’ a voice answers, faint on the wind. It is Tornado, bellowing
but I think I hear an edge to it as if he’s in pain. ‘Jant, where are you? Hayl, is that you?’

‘Tornado!’ I yell with all my strength.

‘Jant! Jant!’ Tornado sounds desperate. ‘Fuck –’

The wind’s noise rises higher and higher. If I open my wings, it will smash me into the ground.

Something whizzes past my face, with the gale, and thuds into the duckboard behind me. I crouch down to investigate. An arrow is sticking in the plank at a steep angle, its bodkin point embedded deeply. Its shaft and white fletchings are still quivering. I start to hear, but not see, more arrows hissing down. They pelt from the sky, from somewhere ahead of me, not spent, striking with force.

I raise my shield in front of my face and feel it jar. Arrows come down like hailstones sweeping across the track, thudding into the corpses, into the soldiers who are still alive but wounded, lying on the ground sweating and twitching. All the ground I can see is filling with arrows. Our archers must be a couple of hundred metres away. Why are they shooting at us?

I yell into the night, ‘Stop!’ and the wind tatters my voice.

Invisible arrows strike the board in front of my toes; one deflects off my shield and drops at my side. They catch in tent fabric. I hear them tap on an Insect shell and the clicking of articulated claws as it scuffles under fallen canvas.

The arrows buzz in well-timed flights, but I can’t hear any voice ordering the loosing. Who’s out there? Lightning – if it is Lightning – must have concluded that everybody is dead or beyond help. The archers will be terrified. They’re protecting themselves and they’re never going to stop. I hurry away from them, stumble over a shaft embedded in the track, and break it.

I catch a glimpse of a single flickering light ahead. It illuminates a white tent from inside. All around is dark so the tent, rectangular because it’s side-on to me, looks as if it is hanging in the air. The light moves slowly, in jerks, along at floor level. It inches towards the entrance; closer and closer. A sense of dread weighs on me because I know what I am going to witness next will be even worse. Whatever comes out of that tent is the last thing alive this side of camp and I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to have to deal with wounds so awful. It will be mutilated and driven so insane by agony it won’t even be human any more. I fervently hope that it dies before it emerges.

A lean hand clutching a lantern pushes out from the flap and Laverock crawls out on his hands and knees – head, shoulders, chest.
I know him as a minsourai captain, a local with vital knowledge of Lowespass. Digging ramparts made him sinewy, with shorn hair and a face like a weathered leather bag. He was raised with the constant pressures of the Insect threat and Awian ambition.

An arrow snicks into the grass beside him, its flights upright.

‘Laverock!’ I cry.

He looks in my direction, not recognising me. As he draws his legs from the tent flap I see he doesn’t have feet. His feet have been bitten off above the ankle, though not cleanly because sharp tubes of white bone stick out from the severed ends: they look like uncooked macaroni.

Insect antennae flicker after him. Bulbous, faceted eyes follow and the thing strikes forward. Laverock’s eyes widen in terror. He pushes himself upright and tries to run on the stumps but his bones sink into the ground like hollow pegs. The Insect seizes his hips low down; its jaws saw over his belly. Laverock knows this is his last second. He snarls in fury as he falls and swings round the iron lantern dangling from his hand. He smashes it over the Insect’s head. Yellow-flaming liquid spreads over its brown carapace. I smell scorching chitin, then Laverock’s shirt and wings catch fire. His long primary feathers drip and shrink as they burn, as if they’re drawing back into his wings. The Insect bites through his body and with a shake of its head throws the top half towards me. The Insect and Laverock’s remains sink to the ground, welded together in the fire, vivid against the line of wrecked tents.

By their light I can suddenly see I’m standing at the edge of a vast pit. The flames jump up and shadow its far side, twenty metres away. I stare at it, uncomprehending: this should be the centre of camp. The conical hole gradually, steadily, widens. Turf breaks off under my feet and rolls into it. I step back, seeing that the slope is covered with debris. On the other side, the Sun Pavilion, collapsed down the incline, lies plastered to it like a gigantic wet sheet, trailing ropes still attached at their ends to dirty uprooted pegs. The brass sun bosses that top its main poles glint among its folds. Dead men are splayed out around and underneath it, pale and naked or half-dressed, some still in sleeping bags. As soil rolls down, they slide towards the base of the cone. Their limbs shift position with jerky marionette motions – they look as if they’re waving. Swords and broken camp bed frames rattle off stones in the soil as they slide; kitbags spill their contents.

Tornado’s voice peals out again, ‘Jant!’ I look up to see the giant man standing on the far bank beset by seven Insects, five on the slope in front of him and one on his either side. Yet more Insects are
running up out of the crater. Tornado backs himself against an empty ambulance cart. It has 1
ST
DIVISION LOWESPASS SELECT roughly stencilled on the side, and its spoked wheels have curved boards nailed to the rims, to widen them and prevent them sinking in the mud.

Tornado’s breeches are slashed and blood wells up from red cuts underneath. It flows down his leg from a deep wound in his thigh. His denim shirt is unbuttoned; his big hands curl around the shaft of his double-headed axe. Every second he is taking wounds that would kill me outright.

An Insect below him darts forward but Tornado swings the axe under its mandibles with such force that he decapitates it. He hews down the ones on left and right with a fluid movement. At his feet a mound of carcasses bleeds thick pale yellow haemolymph down the widening pit. Two more Insects run up the slope and over its rim. He deals one a massive blow, cleaving its thorax through. The other seems to brush past him with a movement of its head but it opens a huge streaming gash in the roll of fat over his unfastened belt buckle. Tornado bellows.

He starts to droop forward. He clutches at the cart for support; it rocks on its curved boards. His knees sag and his skin is pallid. He kneels, one knee then the other, head bowed. I can’t see his face.

I watch as an Insect climbs the cart from behind, crests the top, appears above Tornado’s head as a spiked silhouette, with actions like a jointed puppet. It reaches down to Tornado’s rounded shoulders. It starts to feed.

Under their weight, the edge of the pit gives way and they tumble. Tornado rolls, unconscious and arms loose, down the slope. He hits the edge of the mass of debris and lies still, near the bottom. Soil continues to crumble away; the cart’s front wheels jolt over the edge. It teeters and then runs straight down the slope. Its wheels’ boards slap and leave footprints, its dragging hafts plough furrows. It runs over Tornado’s outstretched arm and fractures it, impacts into the duckboards and broken tents, and comes to rest upright on top of him, its four wheels caging him in.

Tornado’s down. What chance do I have? The oil is burning off Laverock’s Insect and its light is dying down. The shadows shift and I see the base of the pit, where soil has been swept aside from the pale grey bedrock. It has been brushed clean. A wide crack runs across it, separating it into two slabs like deeply buried gravestones. The gap transfixes me – it is pure black – so black that as an illusion it seems
to jump and shimmer. I stare at it as arrows still whicker and thud around my feet.

A flash of movement on my left, and an Insect’s head with open mandibles lunges at my waist. My elbow’s levered up, and before I can stop it, the head is under my shield. I flinch away inside its jaws, with a fast reaction but I can’t dodge far enough: it turns and plunges its open left mandible into my stomach like a dagger. I go rigid with the shock of it penetrating. It tosses its head like a bull goring and I feel the razor mandible gouge upwards. My skin parts before it. My loose hauberk rucks up over its head with a metallic rasp. Its cold jaw slits all the way up and hooks under my lowest rib. It tries to continue its carving slice and pulls me onto the tips of my toes. By luck, I stumble backwards and slip off the point.

With my hand clawed I rake over the bastard thing’s eye but my nails have no effect and I hate myself for reverting to act like a Rhydanne and scratching, while my ice axe drags on the ground.

My strength fails quickly. I raise the axe and bring it down between its eyes, into its forehead plate studded with three smaller eyes and dimpled antennae sockets. The frons plate cracks across like a nutshell and one side lifts up: I glimpse the base of its compound eye rooted in a damp membrane underneath.

The Insect rears up and shoves me. I topple backwards and fall. I brace myself but I’m surprised to find I’m still falling. My wings open instinctively. The pit’s edge tilts up into the sky above me. I hit the slope hard with my left wing under me and – crack! – its bone breaks.

This isn’t my camp bed. Where the fuck –? No: I’m lying on my back on the slope with my wing buckled underneath me and I had better not faint again. My right arm is outstretched, the strap around my wrist is holding me attached to the axe pick still embedded in the Insect’s head.

It lies flat; its head moving left and right in its death throes tugs at my arm. Its mandibles open and close. Its flattened forelegs kick back and forth, scooping soil off the top of the slope. Turf chunks and grainy dirt sift down on top of me, covering me lightly all over.

I clutch one hand instinctively across my stomach but the gash is too long to hold together and my fingers sink under the edge of the flap of skin. It is warm and very slick. I feel a loop of gut spill out over my arm. I look down and see it adhering to the ground, picking up pieces of soil and grass blades. Unable to stop it, I watch it uncoil out of my midriff from under the mail shirt. The guts slither over each other; they are different shades of grey and firm to the touch.

All I can see of my wing is the bicep and a sharp shard of broken bone sticking out of the muscle close to my body between the black feathers. As I breathe out, air rushes out of the hollow bone. The air sac inside it inflates slightly out of its pointed end. It is a very thin, moist and silvery membrane. I know that Awians have two air sacs deep in their backs and in their limbs’ long bones nearest the body; humerus and femur, but I’d never seen one balloon out before. I breathe in, dizzy from shock and lack of air, and it inflates. I exhale and it flutters where it’s ruptured and the air flutes out. Under the feathery skin around it, a blister starts to grow as escaping air is trapped there. Oh, fuck. That’s me fucked then if I’m breathing through the bone.

The ground shakes but I don’t roll further down the slope because I’m anchored to the dead Insect at the top. I can’t muster the energy to turn myself over and crawl. I can’t move. I’m going to die here. I have to do something, anything, not just give up. The wind gets under my broken wing and blows it around, grinding as it twirls on the bone. Between gusts it settles down slowly on top of me, then the wind picks it up again. I take my hand from my ripped stomach and reach out to flatten it against the ground but the feather tips still curl up.

The agony begins. It is fiery and sharp, a white-hot blade the length of my side. I lie with my cheek in the cold, uneven soil like a toad’s back and scream. Mud grains get into my mouth and coat the back of my tongue. I grit my teeth and they grate against the surfaces. I feel soil filling my nostrils, I retch with the earthworm smell of loam and cut roots. I scream wordlessly with all my strength, trying to relieve the pain. A human or Awian would scream for help, but Rhydanne don’t because Rhydanne know there is no help to be had.

I can feel the sweat trickling out of my hairline and a stream of blood running freely out of my side, into the ground. I didn’t know I had this much blood.

The uneven piles of dirt close beside me, that I know are tiny, now seem as impassable as mountain ranges, and dark with the organic matter of rotting soldiers … whom I will soon join.

The black sky rains arrows. The wind’s noise is a great distance above me; it doesn’t affect me any more. I feel a warm patch spreading between my legs: I have wet myself. I begin to suffer from an overbearing sense of shame. What will people say when they find out I’ve wet myself and my trousers are sticking to my crotch? But I will be long dead by the time they find me, if they find me at all.

I take another mouthful of dirt and scream again, petrified by the thought of leaving the world for ever. I’m twenty-three; I don’t want
to die. I’m one hundred and thirty years old, I don’t want to die. I can’t feel my toes or fingers, then feet or hands, then legs or arms. The cold clings to my skin like wet cloth. It permeates my bones and my muscles ache with tension. I can’t curl up against it. I am shivering from the freezing air in the wound, it reaches inside my body until I feel as if I am more naked than naked.

I quickly run out of energy and lie exhausted, with my throat raw. The damp ground at last feels comfortable against my cheek. I am as cold as the soil, throughout my body, as if I am already part of it. I start to forget how to breathe. How still I am. I can hear an Insect’s claws scraping underground as it pulls itself through the crevice in the rock.

I sink into fatigue and start slipping into warm sleep despite the pain. I am dimly aware of my body shutting down. I fight to stay awake, in furious denial, but why bother? No one is left to help me. Sleep tempts me. I scream at myself – if you sleep you die! Stay awake! The numbness seeps deeper and I have no choice. It steals up inside my core. While my consciousness fights fiercely to stay awake, a part of my mind falls asleep, then another, blocking it in. I can’t revive my memory. I can’t wake my sense of hearing … touch … vision … I am surrounded by sleeping mind; I die.