by Matt Langley
She didn’t bother correcting him this time.
She saw three fresh bodies half-buried in the pit. Each had been stabbed through the heart. She saw the marks of torture on their flesh. They hadn’t died easy.
But far beyond the terror of their deaths was the horror that came with recognition. She knew these people. That sick recognition hit her with the brutal force of an iron flail across the heart.
Galdar fell to her knees, the Prayer of Absolution mumbling from her lips even as she sobbed and rubbed at her eyes, blinking back the tears. Between each verse, she picked and dried a crumb of earth to eat as she murmured more words, needing to believe in them, to believe that they would make a difference for the dead.
Shryke looked around, wary. “I’m sorry, Galdar. We can’t stay here. Even if the wolves don’t rediscover their courage and come back, we don’t know what killed your people.”
Galdar finished her prayer, felt the tears running down her cheeks and the trembling of her bottom lip.
“They aren’t just people, they have names. Novice Klab, Curate Shul and Pastor Dyne. Slaughtered and discarded like trash. Who would do this?”
Shryke climbed down into the pit, examining the bodies more closely. He moved their slack jaws and felt their broken bones, then looked back up at her. “This was all done before death. Time was taken over it.” He was telling her they were tortured. “Their mouths and throats are untouched by violence, see? They were expected to talk. I’ve seen wounds like this before.”
“Of course, you have,” she said, more harshly than she intended. He didn’t take it as a rebuke. “But what could they possibly have said? We have no secrets of worth.”
“There’s a life lesson here, Galdar. It doesn’t matter how little you have to tell if the person forcing you to talk believes you know more.” It was hard to argue with his logic, as ugly as it was. “And these tortures were inflicted by people with no small skill in this stuff.”
“Raiders?”
“No.”
“Then who?” And then, the question that would answer the first. “Where have you seen such tortures?”
Shryke, standing there amongst the dead, knee-deep in corpses, told her, “The Assassin you killed was not acting alone.”
“His people want revenge? Are you saying I caused this? By saving your life I killed my people?” The horror of the thought rose in Galdar, overwhelming her; the very idea sliced her open deeper than any blade could have. Those tears became wracking sobs. She cried for her friends, for cheeky, happy Klab, with her blinding smile and infections laugh, getting them both in trouble when they were small girls for giggling at the back of the Movable Church on Prayer Day. Devout and serious Shul, a finger-wagger and tell-tale, but who had been great comfort to Galdar when her mother had passed over from River-Fever. Shul had sat with Galdar for days, not saying anything, just listening, helping her make the required devotionals to her dead parent. Lastly, noble, wise, Pastor Dyne. A towering figure, but as gentle as a butterfly kiss on your cheek. A man-mountain who never used his size to intimidate or threaten, a man who listened to all points of view before deciding that truly was for the best of all involved.
When Galdar had begun having difficulties with Carlow, Dyne had been the one who most spoke about the good qualities Carlow possessed, and assured her how one day he would be a great leader, and how she, Galdar, complimented Carlow perfectly—together they were a whole and wonderful entity. If only they could just find the time to like each other.
Galdar loathed the idea that Dyne had gone to his death sure that Galdar was a murderer who had shamed herself.
But mostly she cried for herself.
She knew it was selfish, knew it was pointless, but she cried until it felt she had used up all the tears in the universe.
Shryke didn’t move to comfort her. He wasn’t that kind of man.
He was the kind of man you wanted at your side when you sought justice for the lost.
Chapter 10
The journey to Geronterix passed in a blur of colour that succeeded in very little beyond numbing Barl’s mind.
The Guild Protectorate sang with magic and wonder. Most days he was left to himself to wander within. He didn’t have the necessary clearances to leave the turreted castle. Summer told him to: “Get out there, watch, and learn what you can. It’ll serve you well for the test.”
But he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be learning? About the nature of space, stars, and the worlds of the universe? He watched the Trainees and their Tutors make magic and war and felt like he could never possibly belong.
The building itself was full of wide well-lit spaces where the Guild’s trainees were put through their paces by their Tutors. There were as many different races as there were trainees and teachers. The first time Barl saw a Trainee reaching into the air, make a complicated sign, whisper a codespell and pull from the very atmosphere a double handed sword with an edge as keen and lethal as any smith could fashion, Barl’s jaw fell open, slack. His eyes widened enough to hide his eyelids deep-set in his skull and his legs buckled, sending him crashing onto his backside. The trainee who had just summoned the sword from nothing laughed and reached down to him with her hand. “Don’t worry,” she said with a smile that could stop hearts, his especially. She was blond haired, with the face of an innocent, so wide, so natural. “You’re the first fool to fall at my feet,” she said, grinning. Before he could sputter some kind of protest that he wasn’t some farm boy hick, her grin spread even wider and she shook her head. “The first time you’ve seen someone cast a Spell of Creation?”
He nodded.
“It doesn’t get any less incredible,” she promised him. “But you do get used to the miracles.”
“I’m not sure I want to,” he told her.
Barl scrambled to his feet without taking her proffered hand and left the training area. He watched his feet and only his feet. What was happening to him here? What were these creatures? Because they surely weren’t like him.
After a few days of seeing this sort of thing around almost every corner, he began to realise that simply hiding out in the frugal room the Protectorate provided wasn’t really an option. If he was going to survive this experience, and pass whatever test they intended for him, he was going to have to prepare because these others were so far beyond him in every aspect and he couldn’t imagine ever being a match for them without experiencing everything this place represented.
The curious sense of vertigo didn’t last. Soon enough he could walk the cool stony corridors and brightly illuminated cloisters of the building without wanting to throw up his last meal, even if the instinct to simply hide under his bed refused to go away.
He forced himself to explore.
One of the most fascinating places in the entire Protectorate were the Aether Stages. The raised platforms were covered in runic symbols Barl had no hope of deciphering. As best he could understand, they were the platforms from where fully trained Assassins were dispatched on their missions to the worlds which the Liston Nine was in reach of. The Assassins sent on solo missions were dressed in black from toe to turban, the only concession to colour the red jewel they wore in the centre of the headgear. They cast the Incantation of Creation to fashion a weapon before striking a battle stance and seeming to blink out of existence, vanishing into the Quantum Aether. The operation was completed with quiet efficiency. There were many squires in attendance. Some Assassins, he noticed, blinked back almost immediately, their missions complete. He couldn’t imagine how they could be so ruthlessly efficient, given he barely had time to scratch his arse and they were back, the target dead. Some came back with terrible wounds and were carried away by the squires. Others, like the tall blonde-haired Assassin holding that lethal black-bladed sword didn’t come back at all.
The squires consulted instruments and crystals. He saw their faces, crestfallen, as they moved on, and realised what those expressions meant: not every Assassin was successful.
Summer came to check in on him from time to time.
He wouldn’t know when she would appear at his shoulder, and more often than not, failed to mark her approach. She either moved silently, or just stepped clear out of the air at will, like an Assassin from an Aether Stage. It was more likely than not a combination of the two, judging by the other miracles he saw regularly in the Protectorate.
This place was unlike anywhere in God’s Heart.
On the sixteenth morning, while Barl foraged in an ornamental garden that appeared to be outside on a bright summer day beneath blue skies and white clouds, but in truth was accessed through a door off one of the main thoroughfares of the castle and was, he knew, still within the walls of the Protectorate, Summer tapped him on the shoulder. “How’s tricks?”
Barl spun around.
Summer stood between him and the gnarly bark of a huge tree Barl knew could not be real. Summer smiled that infuriating smile of hers, her dark skin every bit as enchanting as the false morning sun.
“There are too many of them,” Barl said gloomily. “This whole place is nothing but a trick. If a trick is another word for a lie.”
Summer laughed gently and put a slender arm around his shoulders. They walked through the ankle high grass, following a well-trodden walk down towards the stream. The bright waters washed over a perfectly jagged spur of rock.
As they approached, Barl realised that the water was so clear he could see the smooth stones, the same colour, make-up and arrangement, of the stones that made up the walls of the Protectorate, on the bottom. It was further proof that the entire construction, even though Barl felt like he could squint and shade his eyes and peer off into a far distance, was a lie. He didn’t know how they did it, these people, but they seemed to be able to manufacture anything with their strange magics. The entire place reeked of the stuff.
“You seem to be settling in.” she said.
“Appearances can be deceptive,” he said. “I’m getting used to it, that isn’t the same as belonging here.”
“Good point well made.”
“I miss my home.”
“Of course, you do.”
“I’ve been watching the Aether Stages.”
As though she read his not particularly deep mind, she said, “You don’t want to be running before you can walk, kid. Concentrate on getting to Pantonyle first. Worry about the Stages later.”
Barl ploughed on. “Some of the Assassins don’t come back, do they?”
Summer looked down at Barl. “Listen, you really…”
“They’re dead, aren’t they?”
“It’s complicated.”
“It’s not that complicated. I don’t want to die far away from home.”
“Then you’d better make sure you don’t,” she smiled gently, taking the barbed edge off her words.
“It would be easier if you just used the Stages to take me home, wouldn’t it?”
“No. But how about we do something useful with your time, like talk about the Test.”
Barl’s eyes dropped.
“I don’t mind admitting that I was never good with tests. They unnerved me and I ended up making mistakes,” Summer said.
“I haven’t thought about the Test.”
“Really? That surprises me.”
“Why? I’ve been too busy watching kids like me magic weapons out of thin air.”
“Ah, yes. It can be a little… difficult at first.”
“If you say so.”
Summer stood, “Get up.” Her whole demeanour and attitude shifted in those two words. Suddenly there was steel in her voice. Barl immediately felt the ice beneath the sunshine. He did as he was told.
“Hold out your hands. Palm up. Like this.” Summer placed her elbows against her sides, lifted her hands and turned the palms up, extending her long fingers.
Barl mirrored her.
Summer closed her eyes.
Her lips moved for a moment, and words from a language he had never heard before, whispered between them.
He felt something: a shiver in the air around him. It prickled against his nerves.
Summer reached into the wound she’d woven in the air with her words, her arm disappearing to the elbow.
Barl had seen this kind of trickery over the past few days, but only from a distance. This was the closest he had been to any sort of codeweaving. The air sizzled and sparked around Summer’s flesh. Light distorted and flared. With a grin of satisfaction, Summer pulled a small but overflowing punnet of Yellowberries from the air and put it down in Barl’s palms.
“Try one,” she said.
Barl hesitated.
“Now,” the steel again.
Barl reached into the punnet and snapped off a berry.
It felt cool and ripe in his fingers.
With some trepidation, he placed the fruit on his tongue and bit into it.
The tastes and flavours of home burst into his mouth, flooding his memory so completely and utterly that with that single bite he was taken back home, in town, the sun on his back, and he heard the clip-clop of hooves on the dried mud of the high street. For just a second, on the breeze, he was sure he heard his mother calling him in for supper…
But then he opened his eyes, and the punnet dropped from his hand.
His legs gave way beneath him, but Summer caught him before he could fall.
“Did you feel it?” She asked.
Barl nodded, looking at the upended punnet and the yellow fruit as they rolled down the banks of the stream into the water.
“You can go home like that whenever you want, Barl, and we will teach you how.”
Barl looked beyond Summer to the stream.
The fruits bobbed in the shallow ripples that weren’t quite waves, and in them saw the metaphor, he was the fruit sailing away in currents over which he had no control, to a destination that he couldn’t guess at, and wouldn’t be able to escape.
A chill ran through Barl.
Although Barl heard the word Geronterix many times over the month it took to travel there, he hadn’t really considered what it was.
A vast screen in the Protectorate announced the ship was now, “In orbit.” And that: “Disembarkation for the journey to the Guild Nest on Pantonyle should begin immediately.”
Summer appeared at the door of his room with a holdall and a new coat.
Barl took the bag. “Thank you.”
“Ready?”
“If I knew what I was supposed to be ready for it would be easier to answer that question.”
Summer switched off the light and the room became a memory.
She walked with Barl through the Protectorate one last time.
It seemed like nearly everyone was leaving with them for the journey down to the Nest. Beings were packing away equipment in large metal-cornered cases that then rose up, seemingly of their own accord, and floated in neat lines behind them. Non-magical weapons were sheathed and everyone, except Barl and Summer, appeared to be in uniform, marking them out as belonging. Yet again he felt like he had no place being here. The uniforms were black and gold, with red sashes that he assumed denoted rank within the group. “Don’t worry,” Summer whispered conspiratorially into Barl’s ear as they joined a long line of Trainees and Tutors heading towards the central square of the Protectorate, “You’ll get your own uniform when we get to Pantonyle.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Barl lied.
“Man, you’re hard work sometimes, kid, you know that?”
They stood in the square for a few minutes until the stream of bodies slowed to a trickle and the Main Screen’s Disembarkation notice changed to a countdown from one hundred.
“The Guild have a rather overblown sense of the dramatic,” she said, looking at the clock above them.
“What’s happening?”
“In the most prosaic sense we’re getting off this ship and getting onto another.”
“But...?”
“But rather than do it like normal
people, walking, taking a travel tube, or even teleport if there was the technology in the Slice. But not the Guild.”
As the countdown moved inexorably towards zero, Barl felt his knees start to tremble and the muscles of his legs loosen. He was determined not to show weakness or fear. He planted his feet firmly and followed the heads of everyone else as they craned their necks to look up towards the ceiling.
Except, there was no ceiling now.
With a rush of wonder, the entire thing blinked out of existence. A gulf of stars reached off into universal expanses past a blue-green planet that held vast oceans, enormous continents above which white clouds sailed and danced.
Between the planet and the opened ceiling of the Protectorate, a complicated arrangement of cubes, spheres and rectangles, held together by a web of silver and golden filigree was turning in the vacuum. It moved closer at a sedate and steady speed.
“The Guild,” continued Summer, “like to keep up the mystique, but what they also like is to make an exit.”
As the countdown reached zero an alarm sounded and everyone in the square lifted off the floor and flew slowly out into space.
If Barl had been near the ground, instead of flying up away from the wide expanse of stonework, his backside would have thumped into it.
Chapter 11
Shryke wasn’t used to comforting crying women.
Galdar moved away from the bodies and, as the tears rushed down her cheeks, she grabbed him, burying her face in his chest.
He didn’t move for a moment, then dropped his steel into the soft earth, and folded his arms protectively around her. This kindness only served to make the girl cling onto him all the more fiercely. He felt her tears through his clothing. Her sobs echoed off the rocks of the pass.
Not sure how best to progress from here, Shryke fell back on ingrained routines: he searched the immediate area for signs of danger, then scoured the ground for any indication where the girl’s people had gone after burying their dead.
In the bright moonlight, he picked out tracks and signs that told the story of a rushed exodus, not a panic, but one driven by fear all the same. But, some of the Congregation were alive, several moving as though injured, judging by their scuffed tracks, dragging feet, and in some, old blood dried.