Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  There had been a battle, though not much of one. They had tried to defend themselves against the Assassins’ onslaught, but they couldn’t hope to do that for long, meaning the Assassins either had the information they had come for or had grown tired killing the fools of the Movable Church. That was as much a blessing as his people would bestow upon this faith. Compared to the alternative, leaving their corpses by the side of the road, it was not necessarily a kindness.

  Galdar rubbed the tears and snot from her face. Her eyes wide with anger and her mouth barred with spit. “These…Assassins…they’re not looking for me, are they? They’re looking for you!”

  “Yes,” he admitted. “They’re looking for me.”

  “What kind of friend are you?”

  “I don’t know,” Shryke replied truthfully. “Not the kind you thought I was.”

  Galdar’s composure was returning. She began to pace. “If I hadn’t killed that woman when you were on your knees… this wouldn’t have happened? My friends would still be alive.”

  Shryke nodded.

  “Does it matter whose fault it is?”

  “Yes!”

  “Then blame me if it helps,” he said.

  The silence grew between them again.

  Shryke was more comfortable with this; the anger that comes after a terrible grief. He’d felt it himself on so many occasions. He could see Galdar was still bereft and struggling to find a balance in her mind that would allow her to function. It wasn’t helped by the proximity of danger, which twisted her instinct to grieve against her need to reach out to him for protection. The Assassins would eventually track them back to these shallow graves, and then onwards wherever they went. How could they not when they had the gift to be anywhere and anywhen within that quaint notion, time?

  Galdar did her best to stifle the sobs, and Shryke was prepared to take the brunt of her anger if it got them moving.

  “Which way did my people go?” Galdar looked for clues he’d already found, but without his skillset she was lost. Shryke pointed. “Downloop. We can follow. Judging by the blood…”

  Galdar closed her eyes, bit her lip.

  Shryke found himself admiring her for the first time: he could see the effort she it took not to break down again. He thought better of acknowledging it so carried on. “…and how it has dried; at a guess they left here no more than twelve hours ago. If we travel fast, we’ll catch them by the second-sunrise.”

  Galdar nodded. She didn’t look back. She set off in the direction Shryke had indicated without a word.

  Shryke smiled grimly.

  Perhaps this girl was more of a woman after all? And a strong one at that. A warrior.

  He heaved the pack onto his back, picked up his steel and followed.

  They walked through the night, making good progress down through the mountainous terrain.

  The chill helped to keep their thirst at bay and gave them fresh impetus when a soft breeze struck up just before dawn. They crossed a mountain stream from which Shryke took a moment to refill his gourds. Galdar refused the opportunity to sit and rest. While Shryke stood knee deep in the gently working water, she paced the riverbank, eager to be moving again. He saw the pent-up energy, her eyes fixed on the route ahead, not willing to waste a moment between now and finding the survivors of her Moveable Church.

  Shryke was keen to get going too.

  He’d lost several days to the journey, and however much his feelings towards her had changed, the reality of his own situation hadn’t changed. He still had his own mission to complete, even if he couldn’t remember what that was, or why the Guild would be sending hunters after him.

  When Galdar was back with her people, he would take the time to prepare for the battles he knew were waiting, and weave the codespells he needed to unlock his memories.

  But that was a far-off thought.

  Right now, they had more pressing concerns: if a small force of Assassins were already on the Chain then that compounded the immediate dangers ten-fold. Raiders on one side, Assassins on the other, and Galdar and Shryke in between. It wasn’t a pleasing prospect.

  “Come on!” Galdar stopped pacing. She pitched her voice low, but harsh, demanding, across the water at Shryke.

  Shryke waded towards her and climbed out of the stream, hanging the gourds back on the packs.

  Firstsun was starting to send shivers of light through the valley mist ahead and the hazy, distant mirage of the Overloop was slowly picked out in the dawn sky. If Shryke squinted, he could see high above to the Crossloop of the next link in the chain. That was the link where Shryke had arrived on the Chainworld. A loop very different to this one. Cities of golden spires, sapphire seas, and vast trading economies. Commerce carried out in baskets slung below airships propelled in the skies, moving against the thrust of brass screws turned by steam engines. How Shryke wished he had an airship now. They would make the escape from the Thalladon Climbs in a tenth of the time it would take them on foot.

  He resolved to steal a horse at the earliest opportunity.

  Morning bloomed bright and fresh in the valley.

  Galdar stalked on ahead, with Shryke only occasionally having to call for her to change direction, following the more subtle signs of the Moveable Church’s passage.

  At midmorning, they found where the party had camped for the night.

  Hearths were still warm and smoky. A pit had been dug for refuse, this time without any bodies left to rot.

  This renewed Galdar’s spirits. She broke into a loping trot, pushing herself to close the distance between them and her people. Shryke could understand the desire. His home and his people… so long ago. In such a distant time. He couldn’t remember their faces now. It had been such a very long time since he could call them to mind with any clarity. And the village where he had lived? That was lost to the smear across his thoughts that was the past. A brightening line of indistinct colour on his memory. When he thought of it now, it didn’t conjure any specific images, but it felt like home. And that was in many ways all he needed; anything else would only dull his purpose and deflect him from his end-goal.

  Though every time he did dredge through his memories, he came across that huge gap where more recent life should have been.

  How had he come to the Climbs?

  Why?

  On what mission?

  The chill of it went up and down his spine. He daren’t use any magic to investigate his mind further, but the temptation was there. And it was strong. Shryke was uncomfortable in his own head. He felt like an unwelcome visitor inside his own skull. This was not a something he could allow to continue indefinitely.

  Shryke liked simple solutions.

  If only there was someone’s head he could remove from a set of shoulders to fix it, that was the kind of answer he was more than capable of finding.

  The tracks of the Moveable Church veered into scrubby woodland.

  Shryke assumed the survivors had felt the open valley was too exposed, especially given their numbers, and so had decided to take a route through the trees in the hope of throwing off any pursuers.

  Shryke smiled inwardly, these religious observants were not skilled in the ways of war or hunting.

  Going into woodland would make the task of following them easier.

  “Slow down,” Shryke called to Galdar as she sprinted through the trees. There were signs of passage even she couldn’t miss—the broken twigs, the flattened ankle grass and the half prints in the wet earth. She didn’t need Shryke. In her mind safety was within arm’s length, but not his arms. She didn’t listen to him; she was in a headlong rush, plunging deeper into the undergrowth.

  Shryke strained to differentiate the different sounds in the forest, trying to hear beyond the noise of her crashing footsteps. He heard something… a low…singing?

  Were these people imbeciles?

  It struck him then, they were worse than that, they were fanatics. They’d gone into the forest to hold some sort of ceremony or ri
te, not to hide at all.

  Shryke shook his head.

  He hefted the pack high onto his shoulders and began to run after Galdar.

  Knowing that no amount of calling would get her to slow down, he had no choice but to move as fast as she was, and that meant crashing through the trees in pursuit.

  He surged on, pushing back branches as they slapped at his face and body, hurdling deadfall, and blundering forward, trying to keep her in sight as she ran towards the voices.

  He heard something else, but before he could grasp the implications of the sound, or what was behind it, a gnarled branch swung whistling through the still air, and hammered into the back of Shryke’s skull, sending him tumbling in an explosion of pain that opened the way to the cold, starry blackness of unconscious.

  Chapter 12

  Barl looked at his hands.

  Palm up. Elbows in.

  Sweat broke on his brow.

  His lips trembled.

  A tear appeared in the corner of one eye; he felt it trace a line down his hot, red cheek.

  He forced himself to stare into the flats of his hands, working his gaze into the cracks between his fingers, zeroing in on the lines across his palms as he tried to see beyond the skin into the inner realms of his being. Without understanding what he was trying to do, he was doing it anyway, dismantling the very atoms that made up his body and opening a gap through the particles of his existence.

  The sweat poured from him.

  He felt it pool in his armpits. Felt it trickle down the inside of his shirt, Felt the thin material cling to his skin.

  His ears hummed and his mouth dried.

  Nothing.

  With a rasp of frustration Barl dropped his hands, spun around, his body twisting in the half-gravity of the ship, and drifted towards his bed.

  The Inter-Star System Freight and Passenger Assemblage—‘Minular’ was, Summer had explained, a ship the Guild had chartered to take the Trainees from Geronterix to Pantonyle. Apart from the lack of full gravity, Summer had described it as “a fairly normal ship—if a lot smaller than the Liston Nine.” There were no cities inside for one thing, and the Guild had just three floors in the accommodation sphere rather than a whole Castle Protectorate. But the level of technology and the dizzying array of the alien inhabitants more than matched those of the Colony Ship.

  The Bantoscree themselves, the species that owned and crewed the Minular, were nine-foot-high sacs of pulsating flesh that floated gently around the corridors and living areas of the ship, polite and helpful, and on occasion dryly funny. However long they had been in contact with humanoid species, the Bantoscree had never stopped finding the ideas of limbs both limiting and hilarious.

  When Barl edged past a Bantoscree in a corridor, taking care not to bump into it, the creature would invariably laugh and wave a coiled tendril in the direction of his Barl’s gangly arms or flapping feet, trying to get purchase in the low gravity environment. His gawkiness amused them constantly. He was getting used to it. For the first few days onboard, Barl had felt like a newborn foal trying not to fall over. One Bantoscree, Gharlin, had been assigned to his quarters as guardian or observer (it was never that clear which, meaning it was probably both) and had taken a shine to the boy. He was almost telepathically present in the corridor when Barl left for the morning. Every morning. And would float alongside him to the Guild Training Deck. Barl couldn’t help but wonder if the creature had been waiting out there all night for him to emerge?

  Perhaps Gharlin had.

  Who knew how these creatures spent their time when the Trainees weren’t round them?

  Maybe waiting in corridors made them happy?

  It wasn’t his place to question them.

  It didn’t help that the things stank, like rancid cheese, which only made him all the more determined to avoid physical contact.

  “You appear to be acclimatizing,” Gharlin said on the seventh morning of the journey, floating alongside Barl, who took enormous, loping strides towards the Training Deck.

  “It’s not so bad after a while. Once you get used to it.”

  “Let us hope you remember how to walk once we arrive at our destination. The Bantoscree cannot visit Pantonyle without a Pressure Gravity Cage, so I would not know. Tell me. Your legs? Why do they only bend in one place? That seems to be a flaw in your evolutionary design.”

  Barl looked down at his knees. He’d never thought about why they bent like they did. “I don’t know. What’s evolution?”

  The Bantoscree sighed a puff of putrid gas and shivered the purple of sarcasm, “What are they teaching the young Trainees these days?”

  “I know how to milk a goat,” he said in all seriousness.

  “What is a goat?”

  Barl smiled, “What are they teaching young Bantoscree these days?”

  Gharlin shivered a yellowy red and its tendrils curled and uncurled. Barl assumed that’s what passed in its species for laughter.

  Barl was a long way from laughing right now, however.

  The frustration of another failure had him bury his head in the pillow and cover the top of his head with his hands. In the warm dark Barl imagined God’s Heart; the sound of corn rustling in the breeze, the lowing of the cows coming in for milking; the bleat of goats in their pens. His father’s voice saying words he couldn’t hear, and in a faraway dreamy distance, his mother waving to him across the warm evening. She was pleased to see him coming home, walking up the track towards town…but…

  Barl thumped his hand down hard on the mattress, the recoil lifting his body clear of it. He hung there for a moment, not exactly weightless, twisting in the warm air, before he fell back towards the bed with a groan of frustration.

  Summer had spent much of yesterday showing Barl more magic; transporting herself invisibly from one corner of the Training Deck to the other, creating weapons from nothing but the air they breathed and using the reduced gravity to fly.

  Prolonged time spent weaving the codespells forced Summer to draw on a lot of her internal energies. After a few hours of showing Barl what could be possible in his future if he didn’t fail the coming test, she was spent.

  They rested against the bulkhead and watched the other trainees going through their rituals and routines. As fast as some created weapons, others used newfound skills to dissipate the blades and barrels into smoky nothings with the whisper of an incantation on their lips, and an almost imperceptible gesture.

  Summer breathed heavily, a sheen of sweat sparkling on her dark skin. “Nothing’s free, kid,” she said, smiling. There was a lesson in this she wanted him to learn. “Every spell you cast costs. And the greater the codespells you weave the higher the price you pay in energy and emotion.”

  “In…emotion?”

  Summer nodded. “Oh yes. It takes a toll, believe me. You’ll be visiting the Plain soon enough. You’ll understand then, in ways I can’t explain beyond saying you will be forced to fight for your spells, and battle for your energy.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “I know you don’t,” Summer drew up her knees and rested her chin on them. Her whole aspect sank; not changing to steel this time. It was as though she had deflated. Breath hissed from between her teeth.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Summer shrugged. “Everything hurts.” With that, Summer got up and pulled Barl to his feet. “Come on. Hands!”

  This instruction had become a familiar one on the Minular. It meant that Barl was to place his elbows in, turn his palms up and try to make something, anything, appear in his hands.

  Summer held her hands at the ready and nodded. “Go.”

  Barl concentrated on his palms, but as fiercely as his focus was internal, he still felt Summer’s eyes boring into him.

  A small ornamental knife blinked into existence on Summer’s palm.

  And still nothing on his.

  Barl concentrated harder. Pushing his thoughts into his hands.

  Summer dismis
sed the knife into silver, acrid smoke. “You can do it. I know you can. It’s in your bones.”

  A golden goblet filled with chilled wine appeared between Summer’s palms. She drank down the wine in a single swallow and threw the goblet over her shoulder, unmaking it with a nod of her head before it could hit the floor.

  Barl pushed harder, but the images would not come.

  There was a grey emptiness within his mind. It engulfed and smothered his thoughts.

  Summer willed him on. “When you’ve done it once, it will become easier, I promise.”

  “I thought you said I had to pass the Guild test first—before I did this.”

  There was a twinkle in her eye as she told him, “If you don’t tell them neither will I. Come on, Barl be the devil I know you are.”

  Barl fought his thoughts hard.

  He dived into the grey.

  Kicked at it.

  Punched at it, but it absorbed everything.

  It was nearly a minute before he realised his tongue was trapped between his teeth and that his incisors were slicing into it. The iron taste of blood seeped into his mouth and whatever progress he might have made in that moment was lost.

  He let his hands drop.

  When he looked up through blinking, sweat-stinging eyes, Summer had gone.

  Barl was alone on the Training Deck.

  A door clanged closed behind him, making him jump.

  He looked around, realising that all the other trainees had gone, too.

  Even Gharlin wasn’t lurking in the corridor waiting to escort him back to his room.

  He’d seen neither hide nor hair of another soul in the hour since.

  Barl got up from the bed, sighing deeply.

  He placed his feet firmly on the deck, dug his elbows into his side and turned his palms towards the ceiling. If he had this power, as Summer was adamant he had, then he was going to uncover it. Not because he wanted to become a Guild Assassin, but because if it were as powerful as Summer’s magic, then surely he could use it to go home to God’s Heart.