by Andy Graham
3
The Weeping Wood
The change in the forest was a subtle one. The light was heavier, the sounds more monochrome. The flashes of movement that tried to bewitch him were nothing more than branches swaying in the wind. Some of these trees dated back to when Ailan had been called Brettia. The locals called them wise trees. Their thick trunks twisted up through the gloom, wooden waterfalls that defied gravity.
Ray’s footsteps slowed. He placed the kids down on a bank of moss, forced them awake to drink some sugared water, and crouched down in the shadows. They’d all been awake for almost twenty-four hours. He had to rest.
A branch groaned above him. He’d never been able to pin down when the change in the woods happened. It was akin to realising something that used to hurt now didn’t. There was no transition period; it just somehow slid from one state to the next with no conscious realisation.
A rare troupe of travelling actors had visited his village of Tear when he’d been a kid. They had brought with them a painted cloth backdrop of a forest. The sense Ray had now, standing in the original Weeping Woods, was the same he’d had that day after the performance had finished. While he’d been absorbed in the show, the painting of trees had seemed real enough to a child not much older than the boy at his feet. Afterwards, standing in the orchard behind his village, with the buzz of insects in his ears and the summer smell in his nose, the reality of that backdrop had faded.
Compared to where he was standing now, the newer part of the Weeping Woods was pretending to be a forest, too.
It came crashing through the trees. Branches whipped at its face. They clawed at its eyes with sharp needles. It didn’t care. It had to catch this man. This legionnaire. The light in its wrist flicked randomly between amber and green and amber and green and amber and green. It was doing what they wanted. Why wouldn’t they stop?
The kids, lying top to toe, whimpered in their sleep. The resemblance to their mother was obvious, more so in the little girl, though that was possibly because Ray had never met Stella Swann’s husband. The girl’s hair and eyes were a different colour to her mother’s, but the shape of her face, the smile and the determination were all straight up Stella.
Ray smiled ruefully. In a few months he and Stella had gone from illicit (at least on her part) flirting in the Kickshaw to her helping him find out the truth about his dead brother. Along the way, she had disappeared, and now he was trying to rescue her children from a creature that belonged in a comic book like the Atomic Warrior Skeletons he used to read.
You wouldn’t have it any other way. Every man wants to be a hero, a small voice in his head spoke up.
He repeated the last sentence out loud. Hearing his mother’s voice overlaying his. “Everyone wants to be a hero. It’s not just men that have the monopoly on greatness.”
Green. Amber. Green. Amber. Amber. Green. Amber. Quicker. Quicker. Run. Run. Kill.
Ray snapped his eyes open. The kids were lying in his lap. When had he fallen asleep? The fatigue was biting deep now. The damp was soaking through his clothes into the deeper muscles around his spine. Is this what his grandfather, Stann Taille, meant when he said he could feel the cold hand of Father Time in his marrow?
The boy moaned in his sleep. Ray’s grimace was laced with pain. He should have ignored the paper nailed to the preacher tree. He had stumbled into this trap with his eyes shut. A rookie sub-private in the Catering Corps would have seen this one through a blindfold. Why hadn’t he trusted his instincts and stayed hidden? Whoever was playing this game with him knew him better than Ray wanted to admit. Setting Stella’s kids up like that was guaranteed to bring Ray out of hiding.
He heard a crash along his back trail. Time to go. He scooped up the two children, grunting as his back twinged, and headed deeper into the gloom, to a place where he could regroup.
It pushed its way forwards. The fragmented part of who it had been was screaming to stop. The voice sounded odd, like a recording of its voice that was playing too slow. It struggled to hear the words, listen to the internal dialogue, but the amber light under its skin flashed more urgently now. It forced its legs to work quicker, picking knees up higher, and ran on.
Ray tripped over a root and went down heavily on one knee. Pain lanced through his ankle as he rolled to protect the children.
“Focus!” he snapped.
The little girl woke with a start, crystal clear blue eyes welling up with tears. The boy added his wail to hers.
“It’s OK, please, no, don’t cry, it’s OK. We’re almost there. Please.”
There! A cry, a child. Another one, slightly deeper. That way. Close.
Ray slung each child on a hip. Murmuring breathless, soothing sounds, he struggled forwards. A few metres on, he limped out of the trees into a small clearing. He was barely able to put any weight on his left foot. The children, wide-eyed and shaking, had gone silent and clung to him with muddy hands. A fallen tree lay rotting on the ground. It was bathed in the cold light of the moons.
“A fallen tree,” he muttered. “Not a good omen.”
The descendants of the people who had planted the original trees of the Weeping Woods believed it meant bad luck for the children of the person the tree had been planted to honour. He hoped there were no distant Franklins, Tailles, or any other of his relatives associated with that trunk.
“Stop it. You’re behaving like a rookie. You’re just tired, deal with it. It’s a dead tree. Forget that mystic crap.”
Eyes watering with the pain in his ankle, he stumbled over to the tree. They were deep in the Weeping Woods, so close to where he needed to be, had to be; but their stalker was closer. The desperation that had run through his veins for most of his life stirred.
He had failed.
It took a deep breath in midstride. Tears. Sweat. Fear. The air was heavy with the stench of all three. There. Through these old trees.
Ray gently prised the children off himself and placed them under the fallen tree. He brushed the rotting bark off their shoulders, picked it out of their hair. That was nothing to do with the superstition of rotting wood being unlucky; it was just common sense. Ripping a strip of cloth from his cloak, he strapped it round his ankle, trying to work the feeling back into it as he did.
“I want Mummy,” the boy said. He rubbed at the grime under his eyes. “You told us you were going to take us to Mummy, that you’d keep us safe from the bad men.”
Ray tied a knot in the makeshift strapping. “I will. Promise.” He tousled the kid’s hair. “Those men, the bad men, that took you from your home and left you in the field are gone.”
“Why did they snatch us from our beds? Where’s my daddy? Where’s Mummy?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why?”
“I just don’t. But when I find out where you parents are, I’ll take you there.”
The little girl’s perfect white teeth shone out of her dirty face. “Mummy says . . . Mummy says . . .” She burst into tears, lonely and small.
“Is that man chasing us a bad man, too?” the boy asked.
“I don’t know,” Ray answered. He pulled his belt knife out and tested it with his thumb. Could a blade ever be sharp enough?
The boy’s forehead creased into a frown. “Knives are dangerous.”
Ray sheathed it. “Better?”
The boy nodded, face determined. “Is the man chasing us the one who wanted to hurt us in the field?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to fight him?”
“If I have to.”
“If he’s not bad, why are you going to fight him?”
“Because I have to.”
“Why?”
“Because if you don’t fight for what you believe in, then you end up living the life someone else believes in.”
Ray covered them with his cloak, wishing he could think of something to say. He didn’t have children. He didn’t know the magic words to make them feel better. Their mother, the woma
n he had inadvertently dragged into his family’s turbulent history, would know what to say. She seemed to have an answer for most things. But now, he was grasping for words that swam away from his mouth like bobbing apples at Hallowtide. Telling the kids everything was going to be OK felt like telling them fire was cold.
He thumbed the tears away from their eyes. “What’s your dad’s name?”
“Daddy,” the little girl poked her head out from under the cloak. “And Mummy’s Mummy.”
“OK, well I want you both to hide under the blanket and think of Mummy and Daddy. Tell each other all the silly things they do, tell each other all the things they do that annoy you—”
“Daddy washes my hair,” the little girl said. “I don’t want him to do it. I want to do it on my own.”
“Well, I think you need to wash your hair, it’s a little bit muddy.” Ray pulled a piece of dirt out of a curly blonde lock. The girl yelped and her brother pulled her closer.
“And then remember your mummy and daddy love you more than anything.”
“How do you know?” the boy asked.
“Your mummy told me.”
It looked out from behind a tree and saw its prey stooping over something on the ground.
“Children,” it whispered. “He’s protecting children, kids like your own.” It pushed back the branches and forced through the bushes into the clearing. “They’re not my kids,” it replied to itself, wiping the spittle off its chin.
Its limbs raged with an ice-cold numbness, its belly held a furnace. The light flashed amber in its wrist. Each blink of colour that reflected off the leaves seemed like a whip crack to its ears.
The children’s eyes went wide. They disappeared behind Ray’s camouflage cloak. Ray heard the squealing snap of a branch being torn off a tree. He rose into a low crouch. The huge creature stood in front of a low thorn bush, fresh scratches on its legs. It had the face of a malevolent clown ripped from pages of the worst of the tales from the Hallowtide fires.
Flesh dripped off its scalp. Its eyes and mouth were puckered by partly healed scars. They ran in straight lines down his face, gleaming in the moonlight. Its bare chest was a mess of scar tissue carved into shapes. It tapped an ugly, makeshift club against the sides of its shins. A dull orange glow surrounded one wrist.
Muffled sobs filtered out from under his cloak. Ray stepped in front of the children. “I recognise you. You’re from the Donian Mountains. Your scars mark you out as one of the Hoyden.”
It lumbered closer.
“Whatever hold they have over you, we can work this out.”
Ray’s breathing was calm, his mind focused. The bone-numbing fatigue was gone. The pain in his leg was forgotten. All thoughts of failure had disappeared. There was only one thing in his life now.
Its pupils flared, black holes that screwed themselves into purple irises.
Ray held a hand out, palm up. “We don’t need to do this.”
“I have to.” Back bowed, the scarred thing started whimpering. It raised a wrist to its face.
A flickering amber light was reflected out of its eyes. Its shoulders were tense, thick cord-like muscles either side of the neck rigid. The flashing stopped. The face softened as it let out a slow breath. The light winked on again. A solid red beam that shone out of its wrist, soaking the whites of its eyes crimson. It howled, raised its club and charged, stamping on its distorted shadows as if it was trying to bury them.
Ray pulled out his knife.
The rain spat down.
And the moons hid their faces behind a cloud.
4
Plans & Problems
President Bethina Laudanum tossed her sky-blue cloak into a chair and collapsed onto the sofa. She’d had the sofa moved from office to office on her journey from permanent-secretary-to-the-VP to her current position. She wasn’t sentimental as a rule, but the leather sofa held so many memories for her, she refused to let it go.
She stuffed her gloves between the cushions. Part of her knew what she was doing, but most of her didn’t care. It was an old habit that had become yet another form of rebellion against her mother. Anything and everything had gone down the back of the family sofa, including a fish head the day she’d moved out.
Most childhood habits and behaviours were harder to shake than your own shadow. Even on a sunny day, they were waiting just out of sight. This one had stuck more than most. She’d stuffed all sorts of things into this sofa: pens, coins (when they still existed), documents and even knickers. A sigh slipped from her lips. Major Rick Franklin had found one pair of those just before the Silk Revolution. He had been the only man she had truly loved; a man who had gone on to father a family that had been a thorn in the side of the government; a man now rotting in the uranium mines.
A flash of movement caught her eye, disturbing the collage of images of her and Rick. She shoved thoughts of Rick Franklin and the smell of gun oil that had always lingered about him back into the past. On the other side of the large triple-glazed doors that led onto the terrace, tree branches flailed in the wind. “A tree at the top of a sky-scraper,” she said. “Of all my ideas, plans and schemes, I’m beginning to think this was the most sane.”
She called it her Folly Tree. It was a representation of what should and shouldn’t be. Beth had paid for its installation into the building herself once she’d been made president. To her colleagues’ everlasting surprise, she hadn’t felt it right to claim it on expenses. While they had all been gossiping about that and the tree, no one had noticed the changes she had made to the archive room. Some had been minor, practical changes to the layout and indexing, others had been major alterations to the records of her own family, the VP’s and the Franklins’. The only person to spot what she’d been doing had been David Prothero. He’d been hurled to his death by his own son. A son she had seen hunting amongst the women of the Ward again tonight.
Her Folly Tree, straining to maintain its footing in its unreal soil, was more symbolic than she had ever planned. It, too, was starting to buckle under the strain of its forced life. Her engineers had informed her the tree was starting to cause problems. The roots that were supposed to be guided in long channels in the walls down to feeding cells were spreading. Just like the concrete of pavements had slowly burst under the growing pressure of roots beneath the streets (before the greenery had been culled), the steel and glass walls of her tower were beginning to crack.
“Mother Nature doesn’t like being controlled,” Mr Shimek, the gnarled old tree surgeon who had been dragged out of retirement, had told her. “You crack the whip for too long, you try and force the Old Lady, Mother Nature, into a corner against her will, and, sooner or later, she’ll take more than a bite out of the hand wielding that whip.”
She’d tipped Shimek (what she realised later was a year’s wages for some) for his discretion, and sent him and the engineers on their way. His parting words rattled round her ears.
Shimek was wrong. Plants could be controlled. Trees could be squeezed into tiny shapes determined by the gardener. People could, too. Minds and opinions could be squeezed into shapes not of their choice. Beth was an expert at it. She’d come this far; she had too many plots spinning around her ultimate goal: to unite the Ailan, Donian and Mennai people into a coherent whole. She couldn’t stop now.
Her phone buzzed. Its ringtone was muffled. Rooting around behind her, she found it wedged between a cushion and the back of the sofa. She didn’t remember doing that.
It was Verina.
Beth stuffed the phone back and wandered over to the window. The tree was battling the wind, branches and leaves whipping an invisible enemy. It bent in an unseen gust of wind. A chair toppled to the balcony floor, the metal struts bouncing silently on the concrete flagstones.
“Control begets control. Confidence begets confidence. Success, success,” she whispered. It had become a late-night litany for her recently. If a juggler drops a ball, she picks it up again before she can drop another, adds another
one to the display. She keeps dazzling the crowd with her sleight of hand, or fireworks and tinsel on lamp posts, while she builds up to the finale. The question was, how many plots could Beth keep spinning through the air before they all came crashing down to the ground?
The muffled ringing of her phone stopped.
“One, two, three . . .” Beth counted. Her breath misted up the glass of the windows. Her antique office phone burst into a jangling, clanking song, the receiver rattling on its clips.
That would be Verina, as predictable as always.
Beth tramped over to her desk and picked up the receiver.
“She’s dead,” came the crackly voice.
The VP leant back in the bat-wing chair. The red leather was threadbare and worn, and half of the brass studs were missing. As old as it was, Lena conceded, the chair was imposing. The VP made it look like a throne.
“Chaos is a currency,” he repeated. “Secrets, good will, debts, threats and favours are powerful, more so than money in some cases, but chaos is the solution. Do you know why? Chaos causes problems and that is the engine that drives economies.” He took a sip from the glass and placed it on the table between them.
“But Mr Vice President—”
His hands twitched. “I told you, if you don’t want to use my name, then sir will suffice.”
He flashed her a grin that made her feel both dirty and warm. The heat colouring her face was driven by more than the alcohol. He had told her his name but it felt wrong using it.
“I’d still rather be rich,” she said. “I’d rather have money than chaos. At least that way I could live in comfortable chaos.” Did he think her voice was squeaky, too?
“Money’s not important, anyone who can count can make money today. And making money doesn’t mean you’re good at anything. Most of the time it just means you’re good at selling birds’ teeth.”