by Matt Langley
“I pity you,” she said.
Shryke looked down, “As I you.”
“Tell me which direction to go in at Firstsun.”
“You’re serious?”
“Yes. I need to return to the Congregation.”
“Why?”
“It is my life.”
“And the journey back there will almost certainly rob you of it.”
“That’s a risk I am prepared to take…so tell me, which direction? You’ll be better off without me. We both know that I’m only going to slow you down.”
“I passed the Congregation’s encampment on the way up from the Fallow Pass. If I read the land right, they were in the process of breaking camp. They weren’t looking for you. I wonder, why would that be?”
Galdar’s face reddened and she looked to the wet grass around her knees.
“So, I could cut you loose, but if I did, and you somehow found your way back to them, would they even want you back?”
It was a cruel question.
“I don’t know. I left in anger. But I will return with contrition. I will throw myself on their mercy.”
Shryke nodded.
“Why would you want to re-join people who made you so angry that you fled the safety of their camp, got yourself lost and almost murdered?”
“Because I need to confess.” Galdar didn’t want to say the words.
Shryke said nothing.
“The woman I killed…”
He nodded. She knew that he was judging her.
“The assassin that you killed to save me. If it’s forgiveness you need, then I forgive you. A hundred times over. And if it is thanks, then I thank you, from the bottom of my heart.”
“It’s not your forgiveness I want, or your thanks.”
“Aren’t they worthy?”
Galdar put her face in her hands. Rubbed her eyes and bit on her lips. Shryke wouldn’t let the matter drop. “Tell me.”
Galdar didn’t want to say the words. She knew already they were unfair and wrong, but she had no others right now. “You kill like other people breathe. I saw you. I know what you are. Forgiveness from you would be…worthless.”
Shryke considered this for a moment. “Perhaps we can discuss this the next time I have to save your life?”
The conflict inside her raged on, opening out into a knife-edge sadness that sliced deep into her emotions. Here was a man who had done more to keep her alive than any other person in the Sixteen Links and he was anathema to her. He had no faith, had no purpose that she could determine. And yet, he was strong and brave and skilled. And without him she would have been passed from Raider to Raider for their sick pleasure, then killed when her usefulness ended.
She picked a small sliver of dirt from between the grass blades between her knees, dried it between her fingers and ate the grains. Connecting again to the natural world, leading her thoughts from this unnatural one. Taking Dirt was the baseline rite of her faith and the religion of Safehome. The taste and the action of becoming part of the land from which Safehome was made. Becoming an extension of Safehome. Becoming safe.
She felt a calmness for the first time in hours.
And out of it Shryke exploded into action. He leapt over her with a hiss and crashed to the ground five yards away, rolling around; the wet plants and weeds soaked the back of his cloak.
There was a snap and a groan.
As Shryke came up Galdar saw he held a young wood-pig in his hands. Its head lolled on its broken neck, eyes glassy with death.
“Perhaps we’ll risk a small fire. Pig has got to be better than eating dirt,” he said, and she knew he was mocking her, but she didn’t care. The hunger pangs twisted her stomach.
In the end Shryke waited until dawn before he lit the meagre fire beneath a thick canopy of brush and branches in an attempt to dissipate the smoke as best he could. The trick diluted it enough that, with luck, it might not betray them. He gutted the wood-pig expertly and cooked thick cuts of meat that smelt like heaven in Galdar’s nostrils.
After the fighting and their frantic flight, Galdar hadn’t had time to feel hungry, let alone register that she hadn’t eaten for nearly four quarters now, but with the meat on the flames the meat sang beautiful songs in her mouth and filled the gaping hole in her belly with its warm succulence.
Shryke ate like a dog. He was ravenous. He tore at the meat, scoffing down huge succulent fatty chunks. When the meat was finished, he broke the bones and took the marrow, sucking it out of the bone, then ate the pig’s innards with relish. When he finished sucking out the last bone, he burped contentedly and patted his stomach. The only word he said before getting up and kicking dirt over the fire was, “Good.”
Shryke climbed one of the taller pines, looking out into the valley and the mountain climbs. He stayed up there for several minutes, watching the land, before he jumped back down, satisfied that the fire hadn’t given them away.
Galdar took a deep breath and tried to bolster her courage. It would be the last meal she would eat for a while, of that she was sure. “So, you didn’t answer my question last night.”
Shryke was tying up his weapons, “What question was that?”
“Which way back to…what did you call it…? The Fallow Pass? If I can at least find my way back to where the Congregation made camp, I should be able to pick up their trail.”
“You won’t make it,” he said, matter-of-factly. “The Raiders are all over this land. They are hunting. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen them this far from Port Rain or the Heartlands. If I cut you loose, you die.”
“I’ve told you, Shryke, I don’t care. Which way?”
“I won’t have your blood on my hands, woman.”
Shryke put the pack across his shoulders, adjusting the straps for comfort. He sheathed the weapons and put them across the top of the pack. He pointed at the sheath with his thumb. “Tighten that for me, would you?”
She owed him that much, at least. Putting aside her growing frustration, she quickly tightened the weapon’s sheath. “Please,” she said again. “Just tell me where I need to—”
He cut her off. “Have faith.”
He was so damned infuriating. She felt a scream of rage rising, her hands making fists.
But…
No.
Galdar pushed the anger back down.
She refused to sink to his level. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction, not in the same way she had with Carlow. She was better than this. “Fair enough.” she said turning. “I’ll find my own way.”
A hand fell firmly on her shoulder.
Shryke turned Galdar, and again fixed her with those eyes that ached of centuries, not years. “That’s better,” he said. “If we’re going to find the Congregation at the Fallow Pass, avoid Raiders, and whatever dreads or travails might harry us, I need to know that you’re going to be able to keep a check on your anger. There are times to be angry, woman, of course there are, and times where the only choice is to vent your frustrations. But if you’re determined to do this, and not get us killed in the process, you need to learn how to master the anger inside. And it looks like you are actually beginning to grasp that.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“Of course, I am. I didn’t save your life three times only to let you die because of your own pig-headedness.”
“All this? It was a test? You were goading me to see if I could control myself?”
“Yes.”
“And now I’m supposed to be grateful that you’re not actually the complete bastard you’ve been pretending to be.”
“That’s the general idea,” Shryke said, earning himself a slap from Galdar. “I guess I deserved that,” he said, rubbing at the red hand rising on his cheek.
Chapter 8
Barl looked down upon God’s Heart.
Its silvery surface was lit by its own deeply buried luminescence.
Barl had been staring at God’s Heart for what seemed like hours.
/> He knew the metal corridor in which he stood was part of a larger structure moving through the diamond littered blackness towards the vast object, but they didn’t appear to be getting appreciably nearer. The sheer size of God’s Heart drained the energy from the view. It sucked the power out of their forward momentum. They could travel towards it forever without the view changing, such was its vastness.
It was just too big.
“God’s Heart is a constructed world,” said Summer matter-of-factly. “It surrounds its host stars, presenting a massive inner surface where a billion or more tribes live and thrive within an enclosed eco-system. You could live a million lifetimes and never explore a thousandth of it. My employer’s people have been studying it for a hundred thousand years and have barely begun to understand what it takes to open a door. Beyond that it is a mystery.”
“The door you took me through?”
“Yes.”
“Was it built by God?”
“Certainly something like a God,” she said. “As powerful and Godlike to your people as you are to simple bacteria.”
“Bacteria?”
A smile. “We have a long way to go, you and I Barl. For now, just watch and enjoy the view.”
The sheer expanse of God’s Heart continued to grow in the window as they approached. And, incredibly, before too long it stopped being a huge ball in space; he realised that it was flattening to fill the whole view. With a sharp feeling of awe in Barl’s gut, the thinning edges of blackness around God’s Heart disappeared and all that was left was the surface of the object. Smooth and endless. Stretching up and down, side to side. Just God’s Heart. Nothing else.
“I thought you said I couldn’t go home?”
“You can’t, I’m afraid. Consider this a…hmm…flying visit.” Summer said, looking slightly amused at her own choice of words.
“But we’re here. Now. Just let me go back inside.”
“You’re right, we are here now. Your jump was well done.”
“Put me back inside.”
“No. Just watch. You’ll miss it if you don’t concentrate. Trust me.”
Barl wanted to argue. Wanted to plead. Wanted to do anything he could to persuade this woman to just let him go home. Being this close to his God’s Heart, knowing he could almost reach out and touch it was more punishment than he could bear…
“Look…” Summer grinned and pointed to the surface of God’s Heart. Moving across it Barl saw a small black blur racing over the material from which the sphere was constructed. It gradually came into focus. The edges of the shadow began to define. It was arrow shaped to begin with, but began to elongate, keeping the pointed tip as the body of the shadow stretched out thinner and thinner in its wake to form a long block of shade. As they came closer, the edges of the shadow began to open out until they were no longer blurred. Barl saw crenulations and variations in them; one section looked curiously like the battlements on a castle wall, which reminded him of the history books his mother collected for their lessons and thinking of her brought a pang of sadness slicing through Barl’s chest. He pushed it back inside.
The shadow whooshed meticulously straight and blisteringly fast across the landscape. They were close enough to see tiny variations in the surface of God’s Heart. It wasn’t as perfect as it first appeared from distance. When Summer had said that it had been ‘constructed’ Barl hadn’t grasped what she’d meant, but closer, it looked as though vast, precision-made elements had been fitted together on a scale that was unimaginable to Barl.
The whole thing was so bewilderingly immense he couldn’t fit the size of it into his head.
Even when he’d been at home on cool spring evenings, when the sky was as clear as it could possibly have been, Barl had never once imagined that on the other side of the sky was a perfect reverse face of land looking back at him. Or that maybe on the other side of that sky, there might be a boy, in his own spring, staring up at his own sun not imagining that, too.
Barl reached out to steady himself on the lip of the window, a deep sense of instability undermining his balance. He forced himself to concentrate on the rushing shadow, powering ever faster over the outer surface of God’s Heart.
“The shadow…what is it?”
Summer put her hand on Barl’s shoulder. “Us,” she said simply.
Barl blinked. It didn’t make any sense; it didn’t look like them…
“Of course, it doesn’t look like us silly,” Summer grinned, reading his thoughts again. “We’re inside it. You’re looking at the shadow of the Liston Nine. A Whole-Environment-Class Colony Cruiser of the Vellotrax Confederacy. They fly in on God’s Heart, skim the surface at half a million klicks, throw up a fusion light behind it to cast the shadow and put on a show. The tourists love it.”
“I…”
“Yeah, I get it. It had a similar effect on me the first time I saw it. It’s really quite something. If the Captain is in a good mood, sometimes she’ll throw up seven or eight fusion lights with multi-flares and spectrum-bursters. Makes the parties on the Ob-decks go with an absolute bang…”
“There isn’t a single word coming out of your mouth that means anything to me,” Barl admitted. He needed both hands on the railing to steady himself.
He felt as if his brains were draining out of one of his ears.
The shadow of the Liston Nine began to fade as the light casting its image dimmed. The shadow blurred as God’s Heart began rapidly to change from a flat surface back into a vast curve.
They were moving away.
Leaving…
Barl’s insides twisted. Everything he knew was collapsing in on itself. It was as though he had lived his life on the surface of some huge ice-covered lake, deep beyond imagining, and now Summer, and the heat her name suggested, was melting that ice, and Barl was falling through the cracks in the surface of his experience.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s head up to the Guild Protectorate and I’ll teach you how to make real magic from thin air.”
Summer took Barl gently by the hand and led him away without resistance.
He was drowning.
On the journey through the corridors of Liston Nine, Barl felt like the shadow powering across the surface of God’s Heart.
His body and mind were all blur with very little definition.
The metal corridor ended in a glass tube into which Summer pushed Barl gently with two fingers at his back. His feet lifted free of the floor, and he floated slowly forward.
Just another miracle in a universe of new miracles.
Barl moved in the air as if he were back in the water, swimming. With a firmer nudge, Summer propelled the boy along until he’d built up enough speed in the frictionless environment to travel without her help. The tube ran out above free air. They were passing over huge cities illuminated in the artificial night. Lights and buildings miles below; horseless carriages moving along wide roads, some of them were even flying around between buildings. The cities were inside a huge walled room miles and miles across. Cities clung to those walls, and when Barl looked up within the tube, he saw even more of them, cities piled on cities hanging from what he took to be the ceiling.
He wanted to puke.
Once through the tube, Summer pulled Barl down onto pavements on which he didn’t need to walk. The pavements did the walking for him. Moving on silent metal plates.
Everywhere was opulence and beauty.
Everything seemed to be made from gold or other precious metals and inlaid with gems that blinked with their own inner lights.
It was hellish.
The moving pavement brought them down a wide spiral into the streets of one of the cities. At ground level, the city towered over Barl, making him feel tiny. He found himself holding Summer’s hand as if she, even as Trickstery and evasive as she could be, was the one point of familiarity he required to stay calm and sane.
The streets of this city moved with a thousand different faces and peoples. There were beings who lo
oked just like Barl, with the same colouring and numbers of limbs, but there were many more who were nothing less than expanded humans. Tall, lithe, with eyes where their mouths should be. One waved a greeting at Summer. She was known here.
Other species came and went as they travelled towards the heart of the city. Short Tripods that bounced and moved like excited dogs, their craniums just one large unblinking eye, the size of Barl’s head.
They stopped at a stall where Summer bought Barl a bowl of a sweet, dessert-like confection. It tasted like solid yellowberry milk; a winter treat in Barl’s Village. But this treat wasn’t made from milk and crushed yellowberries. It had been squeezed from a gland in the neck of a jolly, round bodied creature with a ruddy face and more thin tiny arms than a bushel of corn. Barl had been suspicious at first, but Summer tasted some, and then spooned a tiny amount into his mouth. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but certainly not this explosion of sweet beautiful flavours in his mouth.
“It’s wonderful,” Barl said.
“It all is, “said Summer, casting her arm wide over the brilliance of the city.
As they walked, Summer explained more to Barl about the nature of where he had come from and where he was going, “God’s Heart was made too long ago to remember who made it. There are many old and forgotten races in the universe, but whoever built your home are among the oldest and most forgotten of the lot. Most of God’s Heart defies any kind of investigation so we can’t really tell how old it is, but looking at the other stars in the cluster…”
“Stars?”
“You’ve never seen a star. Of course. Understood. Moving on. God’s Heart is the big ball inside which you lived. We don’t know how old it is, but we suspect very. The people in this Slice have decreed that only on very special occasions, like when we came for you, can anyone contact the people on the inside. As you appreciate, it’s a bit of a culture shock coming from inside the Heart to the wider universe.”
“Then why did you take me?”