Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  With a yell of pain and frustration, Barl got to his feet, trying to make sense of everything. He had no idea where he was, how he’d got here or how the sea could suddenly dry up, replaced by burning sands, or how night could turn into day in the space of a heartbeat, or anything else that was happening to him.

  Mercifully, the thick soles of his best boots protected his feet from the blistering sand.

  Looking up, he saw that there were three suns in the sky. They ran in a line to the horizon. One was red and swollen. It didn’t hurt to stare at it. Indeed, he thought he could see the livid, boiling disc seething with black spots and great arches of fire. The other two suns were hot bright lenses of white, impossible to focus on.

  Barl scanned the horizons. In every direction, sand. Nothing but rolling dunes, frozen waves on an endless silent sea of orange and dust. He turned. It was the same in every direction, nothing but sand from horizon to horizon and in the greeny-blue sharpness of the sky nothing to look at but the suns. Not a cloud. Not a bird. Nothing.

  Barl had never felt more alone in his life.

  “Summer?” Barl shouted, his voice carrying for miles on the wind. Not really knowing how he thought she could hear him, or if he even wanted her to. She was the only point of familiarity in this hot and hellish place, assuming she came back to find him, but even if she did, he had to face the truth: she wasn’t taking him home.

  Barl felt like crying, but realised in this heat, he couldn’t waste the tears.

  If he didn’t find water soon, he would die.

  Barl was being squeezed between the crushing plates of the sand and the suns.

  His body felt like it was seizing up in the heat.

  Each step was an agony, each breath a stinging, cooking blast in his lungs.

  Even though his eyes were open, he dreamed of water.

  Even the salt-water of the night ocean where he’d stupidly tried to attack Summer would be preferable to this deathly heat.

  His thin body trembled.

  His back seared.

  The sand his feet scuffed up as he walked stung at his hands at face.

  He walked away from the three suns.

  He tried to pull his shirt up over his head to protect it, but that only succeeded in exposing his back to the searing triple heat from the sky. As much as he dreamed of water, he dreaded the feel of his skin reddening, cooking and turning to crackling like the skin of a pig on a spit. The world was dunes all the way to the horizon.

  A horizon that didn’t gently curve up into a solid wall as it did in God’s Heart.

  It was proof, more than anything else, that he was walking in a different world.

  You have travelled.

  Her words came back to him.

  Barl walked on.

  He didn’t know where he was going, or even why, only that it was imperative he kept on moving because to stand still meant dying here.

  Barl fell to his knees.

  Got up.

  Stumbled down again.

  Hour after listless hour trailing through fine sand, the end was approaching, and he knew it.

  Perhaps if he just lay down here, closed his eyes, he might be able to remember home?

  Perhaps if he curled into a ball, drawing his knees up to his chest and clasping them tightly in his arms he could imagine the flattened corn of the Festival venue? He could almost remember the stalls and the wrestling tents and the bright banners and snapping pennons.

  Perhaps if he concentrated really hard, as his small, inconsequential life ebbed away into the sand, he could see his parents again?

  Their faces smiling down at him, tending to him in this fever. Mopping his forehead with a cool cloth, dripping chill water into his mouth, putting a balm on his cracking lips, mother sitting on the edge of his bed where he was curled, stroking his hair and singing him lullabies. Perhaps…

  Barl opened his eyes.

  The corridor was dimly lit and made of metal.

  The shock of the cool air in his lungs had Barl clutching at his chest as pain crawled up inside him. He fell onto his knees, gagging and retching up the last of the desert heat from his lungs.

  He knelt there, head down, unmoving.

  How was he supposed to deal with this?

  Was this just a dream?

  Or more likely a nightmare?

  Was he going to wake up in his room back in the village drenched in sweat, trembling with fear? Wanting the night-light back?

  “It’s no dream, Barl,” Summer told him.

  Barl lifted his head to see that she was leaning against the metal wall of the corridor, picking at her nails with the edge of a small knife. She was no longer in her cowl and cloak. She was still dressed in black, and in the dim corridor, it was difficult to see where the material of her clothes ended, and her ebony skin began. She was dressed in a way more appropriate to the conditions, a blouse trimmed with fur at the collar and wrists.

  Barl got up, hugging himself as the chill set in.

  The air in the corridor tasted stale and used.

  There were other aromas, unfamiliar, metallic, and in the distance the dim roar of a huge and mighty furnace, burning all the trees of creation to generate power.

  “You can see inside my head,” Barl said. It wasn’t a question. He’d felt the not so delicate probing of Summer’s mind pushing away at the fringes of his thoughts. He resisted the temptation to ask how.

  Summer nodded. “Not always, but sometimes. When you are uncertain or scared you open up like a flower and I can reach right inside.”

  The very idea that someone could do that, look deep inside him, made Barl feel even more vulnerable.

  “Once you’ve learned a few coding-spells of your own you’ll be able to resist it, but as I’m the one who’ll be teaching you the codespells, for now, well, I’m afraid that I’ll peek inside you whenever I want, but at least I’m being honest about it.”

  He tried to push the thought from his mind. “Where are we?”

  Summer looked around. “You’ve been a devil to keep up with. I only found you in the desert a moment before you went again. Luckily, I caught your ripple very quickly and rode the wave through the Quantum Aether to this place.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Let me put it at its most basic: you travelled. I followed.”

  Barl knew that there was no point in using the anger he felt rising in him to attack Summer. It was pointless. She was too powerful. Too fast.

  “But perhaps we can use our heads, take a look out of the window and see if it gives us an idea?” Summer pushed a blinking light on the corridor wall that came on has her hand reached it. With a hiss and clank the whole wall split in two, grinding open on rusted hinges.

  Behind the wall was an impossibility: a huge silver ball, hanging in blackness.

  It was difficult to get a sense of his true size from here, but Barl felt it in his guts that the ball was enormous.

  “What is that?” he asked, knowing the answer before Summer answered.

  “You call it God’s Heart. That’s your home.”

  Chapter 7

  Shryke pushed Galdar hard, drawing his sword at the same time.

  She clattered into a tree-trunk and slumped, dazed, to the ground, but not without realising Shryke had just saved her life.

  Again.

  Five horses, their mounted Raiders brandishing javelins and crossbows charged towards them. The tree, which a heartbeat before she’d been standing in front of, trembled beneath the impact of crossbow bolts.

  Metal sang.

  Two horses dropped almost immediately. Shryke thudded to his knees and struck out with his steel. The Raiders, unseated from the animals, hit the ground hard.

  Shryke was over them in a second, gutting both with cruel strikes.

  Even as another bolt hissed through the air, aimed squarely at Shryke’s spine, he moved. It wasn’t some wild roll or desperate lung for safety. He simply moved, just a s
ide-step, which took him out of the bolt’s trajectory. As the missile flew wide of the mark and disappeared into the undergrowth, Shryke took a dagger from one of the lifeless Raiders, and cast it underarm, with grim accuracy into the throat of another. The dying Raider rocked backwards in the saddle, and as his horse bolted, still hung in his stirrups, being dragged as the animal burst through the trees, every twist and kick smashing the Raider’s body sickeningly against trunks.

  Corpse, she amended.

  “You should ride away,” her saviour said, calmly. He wasn’t even out of breath despite his injuries and everything they had been through.

  “Should we now?” one of the last two surviving Raiders mocked. “There are forty more of us in these mountains and only one of you. You aren’t walking away from this.”

  “Besides,” his companion said, “I want my fifty coin.”

  “And if I offered you sixty to ride away and forget you saw us?” Shryke asked.

  “Where would be the sport in that?”

  “I’m trying to give you a chance here,” Shryke said. She couldn’t understand why he was wasting his breath trying to reason with these killers. “Not that you deserve one. If you are in such a hurry to die, let’s get on with the killing, shall we?” The lead Raider kicked his mount forward, levelling his lance on Shryke’s bulk.

  Smiling coldly, Shryke threw down his sword, and waited as the great horse’s hooves clattered across the ground. He breathed deeply, centring himself, then closed his eyes.

  She couldn’t believe what she was seeing.

  He inclined his head slightly to the left, like he was listening to the charge, and then, at the last possible moment, his hands moved lightning-fast to grab the point of the Raider’s lance, though it could surely only be inches from impaling him and thrust it back towards the Raider’s chest, using the rider’s forward momentum to lift him clear of his saddle and into the path of the second rider. The screams as the man was impaled on his companion’s lance were wretched. Shryke cut them short with a single short slash of black metal. As the Raider fell away, the last of them dropped his weapon and raised his hands, as though to make peace. “You don’t need to do this. I can just ride away,” the Raider said, looking down at his friend’s blood on his hands.

  Shryke shrugged. “That would have been best for everyone,” he said.

  “I can still do it,” the Raider nodded as though seeing the light.

  “I don’t think so,” Shryke said. “I’m tired of walking. I want your horse.”

  “Take it,” the Raider said. “It’s yours. I don’t mind walking.”

  “The problem is, I don’t trust you to just walk away. I think you’re the kind of craven soul that would get some stupid idea in their heads about avenging their friends, and then you’d do something even more stupid, and try and come for me.”

  “I wouldn’t, I swear,” the Raider said. As last words went, they weren’t the most profound. He held the hilt of the dagger that buried itself in his throat, his mouth chewing blood as it gurgled out over his lips and spilled down his tunic.

  Shryke didn’t waste time watching him die, he caught hold of the swinging bridle of the dead man’s mount, then helped him out of the saddle. He stepped over the Raider as he hit the floor and deftly snagged the bridle of his companion’s horse, and brought the skittish animals to a standstill, whispering in their ears and stroking their mains as if what had happened was nothing more than the natural order of things.

  Perhaps in Shryke’s world it is natural, Galdar thought as she got to her feet. But not mine.

  “Can you ride?” Shryke asked as she looked about, a little lost.

  Galdar nodded.

  “Good,” he handed her the reins of one of the two animals and helped boost her up into the saddle as if she weighed nothing.

  Getting on to the other horse, Shryke kicked on and led Galdar away through the trees at a gallop.

  They rode for three hours before Shryke allowed them to rest.

  He didn’t look back over his shoulder once.

  It was deep into Halfnight, a chilly breeze coming down off the Climbs.

  The storm had long since passed, but the ground was still sodden underfoot and there was no chance it was drying before Firstsun.

  Galdar had wanted to speak to Shryke, wanted to speak to anyone really, about the turmoil raging inside her. She was struggling to cope with the emotions killing that man, but more, the guilt that came with not being able to carry out her regular devotions to the God of Safehome was chewing her up.

  But the words wouldn’t come.

  As a diligent curate, she’d made sure throughout the Congregation’s quest for Safehome, whatever the privations or the situation, that she’d been able to Pray and Take Dirt. It was the most sacred of their ritual beliefs. But this headlong flight had made it impossible to do anything but run. She needed to try to explain, try to make amends and ultimately seek some sort of forgiveness for taking a life. She needed to be heard.

  Shryke seemed to kill so easily. The act itself didn’t touch him. There was no shame, no pain. She couldn’t help but look at him and wonder if the man was hollow? That was what they called empty souls; Hollow Men. She couldn’t understand how he could live with himself. But he had saved her, and for that Galdar resolved to put Shryke front and centre in her prayers—when she finally rested long enough to say them.

  Shryke slowed his animal and jumped down from his horse. In the weak loopmoonlight, he indicated for her to do the same.

  He took his pack down, including the javelin and crossbow he’d acquired from the dead Raiders, and the gourds they used for nourishment, he slapped both horses on the rump, sending them running into the night.

  Galdar was confused.

  Shryke hunkered down, back against a tree. Seeing her confusion, he said, “Too easy for them to track us on the horses. They manufacture heavy quantities of spore. And they’re more likely to keep on hunting us if they think we stole their beasts. We’re better on foot from here on. Once we’ve made it through the valley to the river, we can find a boat to take us downstream and on to Saint Juffour.”

  Galdar shook her head. “I have to return to my people… our Quest for Safehome…”

  Shryke closed his eyes. “No. And before you go getting all self-righteous and holy, every time you speak without thinking you risk bringing those scum down upon us.” She started to object, but he silenced her. “This isn’t up for debate, woman. I need you to think before you speak, but better yet, say nothing, because we are a long way from being safe. Words travel. You understand? They betray us.”

  Galdar bit back on her curse she wanted to spit, and just nodded.

  Shryke’s black eyes bored into her.

  Looking at him now, he couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than she was, despite the way he spoke, but those eyes told a different story. They were the eyes of a man who had seen more than a lifetime’s worth of pain.

  “This Quest…what is it?”

  She appreciated him moving the conversation to safer ground. She felt comfortable talking about her religion and devotions, “I am a curate in the Congregation of the Movable Church. Our scriptures tell us that somewhere on one of the sixteen links of Chainworld, God was born. That place is called Safehome. When we find it, we will make our new lives there. The Moveable Church will no longer have to move.”

  “How long have you been looking?” This was a question Galdar was used to, so many times she had heard it asked over the years from people they had met along the way—the questioners sometimes earnest, sometime sarcastic—she couldn’t tell which flavour Shryke was, but was there a glimmer of mirth in his eye? “It’s not the length of the quest; it’s the quality of the destination,” Galdar said, setting her chin defiantly against ridicule.

  “How long?”

  “One thousand eight hundred and forty-six years.”

  “Across how many links of Chainworld?”

  “Five
, not counting this link.”

  Shryke nodded, smiled to himself, but said nothing, letting the silence squeeze against Galdar’s temper. She trembled but did not rise to the bait. She was determined to keep her anger in check and to act like the devout soul she professed to be. “Shall I gather some firewood?” she asked, instead.

  Shryke looked at her in the same way you might pity a dying dog.

  “No. It’s night. The light and smoke would only draw unwanted attention.”

  She nodded. She should have known that. She wasn’t a stupid woman. But this man… he unnerved her.

  “This quest of yours that has been going on for nearly two thousand years, were you born on it?”

  “Yes of course. I’m not a recruit. I’m First Family.”

  “Help me understand something, after so long, why have you not found the birthplace of the God of Safehome? Don’t you fear that after all this it might not be there to be found?”

  It was a common enough argument. She’d had it with the lots of people their quest met across the Links. “There’s no time limit on faith, Shryke. We have the Oracle’s Prophesy. It tells us that as the Chosen we will find his birthplace, somewhere in the Sixteen Links. In the last five hundred years we have surveyed three Links in the Chain. This Quest will take many generations to complete. We knew that when we first embarked upon it. Faith is not repaid with immediate gratification; it is repaid with the knowledge that keeping faith is the reward within itself.”

  “Which is all well and good, but that doesn’t answer my question, does it? I asked what do you think?”

  “That is what I think.”

  Shryke snorted again, “Do you know what you sound like? You sound like the victim of indoctrination,” he said before she could answer him- “But you’ve known no other life, so of course you buy into it. Why wouldn’t you? It’s not like you can think for yourself or anything.”