Chainworld

by Matt Langley

  The snarl of a wolf, leaping out of the blackness in his head.

  The robed nun continued her approach.

  There were no fires now between her and Shryke.

  As she drew closer, a cool dread seeped into his bones, growing up from the ground up.

  It came out of the earth.

  A damp and scathing chill rose into his body, sitting tight in his throat, blocking out any scream that may have been born there. With rising, impotent, panic, the robed figure came close to Shryke’s paltry fire.

  The fire lit the skull raw face inhabiting the folds of the hood, pieces of dried flesh clinging to the bone in strips. Dry puckered eyes moved slowly in crusty sockets.

  As the full force of the dread overtook Shryke’s paralysed body, a bony, fleshless hand reached towards his forehead, ready to burrow into his skull and end his life where he lay.

  It was The Mother Superior.

  Chapter 16

  Hard Vacuum.

  As the air rushed out of the tube so did all sound.

  Barl was deaf to the destruction of the Minular as it disintegrated around him.

  Cold unlike anything he’d ever experienced thudded into his young body and he felt his eyes begin to frost as his vision crystallised.

  The irony of someone who did not know that the space outside God’s Heart had existed just a few short months ago, now being ejected into it—for the second time—wasn’t lost on him. Either he was the unluckiest boy in the universe, or God herself had a terrible sense of humour.

  The muscles in Barl’s neck hardened. He lost the ability to turn his head.

  His vision was at the mercy of his slowly spinning body and even that would be lost to a patina of ice in a few seconds.

  Then everything blinked out.

  Went dark.

  WHAM!

  Air rushed in.

  It slammed into his ears with sudden fury.

  The ice on his eyes boiled away.

  He hurtled into a soft crash-couch inside a small, spherical room, the air battered out of his lungs by the impact even as more surged in. He rolled in agony off the crash-couch, thudding to the floor.

  Summer’s unconscious face greeted the mist of ice retreating from Barl’s pupils. Her mouth was slack, and thin trickles of blood ran from the corner of her mouth, her nostrils, her ears, and to Barl’s distress the corners of her eyes.

  Summer was crying blood.

  “Summer?” he tried to say, but his voice was nothing more than a crack of sound. Dry and broken. It hurt his larynx to make even that little noise. His skin itched all over. His spine protested as he tried to sit up.

  Reaching for Summer, he touched her braided hair, stroked it.

  She stirred but didn’t wake.

  Her lips moved on a couple of soundless words and then were still.

  But she wasn’t dead.

  Barl knew enough to grasp that bleeding from the eyes wasn’t a good thing.

  But he couldn’t see any other signs of injury.

  Her clothes were intact. No tears. No blood seeped out from any wounds.

  Barl’s neck had relaxed enough to take in his surroundings.

  He was inside a ball-shaped room covered in soft, safe looking surfaces. Gravity felt normal for the Minular. As he looked up, there was a glass porthole through which a star-field moved.

  He looked around for something he could use to warm Summer.

  Was this the escape capsule?

  Barl had no idea how he’d arrived here but looking at Summer and the blood seeping from her eyes and ears he could make a guess. She’d taken herself to the very limits of her strength to bring him in here, and it had taken a terrible toll on her.

  Unable to see anything he could easily put to use, Barl took off his thin jacket, folded it a few times, and placed it under Summer’s head as a pillow. The blood on her face was drying in the warmth of the capsule. It didn’t appear to be free flowing. That had to be a good sign.

  Barl stood and looked around.

  There were thin instrument panels designed to be used by Bantoscree tendrils, and small instruction signs—or at least that was what he assumed they were. He could no longer read the alien script. He didn’t dare touch any of the controls in case something he touched inadvertently fired off a door or vented the air into space or something.

  Barl jumped up in the low gravity, stretching to reach the porthole and peered out into the void.

  What was left of the Minular hung dead and dark in the vacuum, lit only by distant starlight.

  The small fighters had gone, their vicious work done.

  Barl tried to see if there were any other escape capsules floating nearby, but if there were, he couldn’t see them. The star field outside the porthole wasn’t only slowly revolving, but the distance between the capsule and the wrecked Minular was also increasing—quickly enough to suggest that soon he would no longer be able to see the ship with his naked eye.

  Barl craned his neck to give himself the widest spread of sky to scan.

  Milky gulfs of stars crossed vast bands of night in one direction.

  In another, a misty patch resembling gargantuan gas cloud, lit internally by a lush pink glow, pulsated as he looked on.

  Barl couldn’t tell, as he had no frame of reference to measure, if the gas was within touching distance or a billion miles away.

  His gaze swung back to the wreck.

  The Minular had been opened up like a goat on a butcher’s table: gutted and stripped. There were no obvious signs of life. Not a light or a fire. Sections of it spun into each other, crashing together and breaking apart to fly off in new directions, while others were held to the main wreck by silver filigrees of tortured metal.

  Barl thought of the Bantoscree Gharlin, crushed by the sudden increase in gravity and then torn from the ship, thrown into the merciless vacuum.

  He hoped against hope that at least some of their kind had escaped but knew that was unlikely.

  If Gharlin was dead, Barl thought, he owed it to his friend to visit he, she, its family and tell them what a wonderful soul Gharlin had been. But he doubted he would ever manage to make that visit. He hoped he lived long enough to prove himself wrong.

  Barl let himself sit back down on one of the soft crash-couches.

  He felt enormously tired, as if all the life in him had drained away. He felt the heaviness of exhaustion in his limbs, and the call of sleep. The feeling pervaded his bones, and yet just seconds before he’d felt wide awake and alert but now…

  A thin dribble of drool made its way from the corner of his mouth down his chin. He didn’t care, didn’t have the energy to wipe it away…

  Barl caught a flash of movement in the corner of his eye and for a few seconds his heart leapt, thinking that Summer was awake and recovering, but that didn’t make sense, Summer was still unmoving on the deck of the capsule beside him, her head resting on his folded-up jacket.

  Barl wanted to turn his head but didn’t.

  It would take too much energy.

  It would…

  The movement again.

  Like a swish of a dark red robe.

  As though someone stood beside him.

  But that couldn’t be…?

  He was alone in the capsule with Summer.

  Barl’s eyes closed. He fought to open them again.

  Why fight?

  Surely, I deserve to sleep? It’s been a terrible day. Sleep heals and…

  With supreme effort Barl turned his head to where the swish of red robe had last been.

  Don’t look.

  He kept turning his head.

  Don’t look.

  There was more robe. A figure. Someone was there.

  Barl could only see the folds of dark red. He couldn’t see limbs or a face.

  He needed to look…

  Don’t look up.

  …up. But sleep. Sleep was so warm. So beautiful. Everything would be all right if only he slept.

  If onl
y…

  The face was a grinning mask of skull, smothered in decayed flesh. Insects moved in the mouth, in and out of the gaps in the teeth. Eyes, revolved in the scabbed crusts of the sockets, staring through Barl.

  Something dry and dead pushed itself into Barl’s mind.

  A thin, bony arm bereft of flesh disappeared out of his vision. Those fingers reached through his hair. He felt the crackling knuckles scrape against the inside of his skull, felt the invasion within his brain, tapping against the inside of his face.

  Barl wanted to scream.

  Don’t scream.

  Terror. Pain. What was…

  Don’t scream.

  The voice was a dead whisper inside his throat; it filled his mouth with a fist of white bone fingers. It pushed down his tongue, closing his lips with a sharp pinch from the inside.

  Barl’s eyes swept crazily side-to-side, tears bubbling from the depths of the sockets. His breathing rasped and tugged at his chest. His heart cowered from the bone fingers reaching towards it. Down. Down. Through his gullet, expanding his neck to the point of splitting.

  The red robed abomination leaned in …

  Don’t scream.

  I want to…

  Just die.

  Summer crashed into the robed skeleton and tore it away from Barl.

  The boy fell limp to the deck. She had no way of knowing if Barl was aware of what was happening, only that he couldn’t help.

  The creature was thrown back against the porthole, but not before it reached into Summer’s guts and twisted and yanked at the strings of intestine. She screamed through the sheer blinding agony of it, but kept on fighting. She punched the skull. The jaw cracked and hung limp. She kicked it in the belly, and then conjuring a battle-mace, thick and heavy from the air with a whisper of the codespell, smashed it into the creature’s body, slamming the damned thing back against the porthole.

  The creature passed through the glass and travelled outside the capsule as if the wall wasn’t there.

  She didn’t understand.

  How?

  She closed the distance to the hull wall.

  The creature’s eyes blazed before her in the half-heartbeat before they blinked out of existence and the red robed creature of ethereal bone was gone.

  Summer dropped the battle-mace and then dropped herself, falling back onto a crash-couch. Fresh blood streamed from her nose and eyes. The pain was beyond bearing. It tore through the muscles of her midriff.

  As Barl looked on helplessly, blood began seeping through the material beneath Summer’s fingers, blooming there like a deadly flower.

  “No. Not that one. The next one along.” Summer’s voice hissed through pain and gasped breath. She was sitting up; her knees wedged against her guts, in what Barl feared was an attempt to stop them spilling out of her body.

  Summer directed Barl to get a Medipac from one of the storage containers in the capsule. She didn’t have the energy to piggyback his mind and share the meaning of these unfamiliar words. Barl had a thousand questions about what had attacked them, both in the capsule and back on the ship, but finally free of the influence of the creature and able to move again, he knew he had to act fast to save Summer.

  “Yes. That one. The latch. It’s on the side.” He fumbled with the latch, struggling to open it. “Come on. Dying here.”

  He finally sprung the lock.

  Inside he found a complicated looking piece of machinery that was easily the size of his hand, fingers outstretched, “Is this it?”

  “Yes. Now throw it down!”

  Barl unclipped the Medipac from its cradle inside the locker and dropped it into Summer’s open hand.

  Wincing in pain, her fingers trembling, she worked at several switches on the device’s shell, and crying out, pulled up her tunic to expose the gaping wound that sliced deep through the layers of her belly. The blood and the muscle and loops of grey gut was terrifying. She set the machine down on her belly and sank back against the wall, letting the Medipac do its work.

  Barl had to look away.

  The machine whirred to life with a deep buzz that hummed through the entire chamber, and a wild whizz that sounded like blades chopping madly against each other. He couldn’t look at Summer.

  He was sure she was going to die on him.

  After several minutes, the mad chorus of noises stopped.

  He heard Summer slump to the deck, unconscious or dead.

  He finally looked at her and saw that the Medipac had slid away from the wound, still clinging to her skin above it. A pattern of lights blinked slowly on and off, is if the thing were somehow listening to what was happening inside her. The wound on Summer’s belly was closed and stitched with crazy lightning-jagged lines of suture thread. Blood still oozed between the stitches, but she was alive.

  Barl felt utterly helpless. And more than anything, scared.

  With Summer unconscious what would stop the creature returning?

  Barl sat beside Summer.

  He picked up her hand and squeezed it to his chest, unsure if he were comforting Summer or himself…

  Chapter 17

  Don’t scream.

  Shryke couldn’t move.

  The Mother Superior’s festering face and white bone arm snaked with cruel precision from her red robe into the top of his head. It was his whole existence. It blotted out the sleeping Congregation and the camp. There was only Mother Superior.

  Don’t scream.

  Just die.

  Shryke’s helplessness, his inability to fight back against the bony intruder defiling his skull, grew into a harsh panic deep down in his guts. Somehow, she was stopping him even attempting to flee to The Plain to beg for new reserves of energy, new codespells. New hope.

  If he tried working at the very edges of his ability, he could barely summon the will to lift the tip of his index finger from the bedding, but that wasn’t enough to muster even the smallest of resistance magic to conjure an escape.

  Shryke looked away from the suppurating visage above him.

  He tasted the rancid breath that even rushed out over the blackened teeth set in the Mother Superior’s insect infested mouth.

  He could barely make out the tip of his short sword sheathed beside the bed.

  It was only inches away, but it might as well have been miles, such was the extent of the crushing paralysis.

  His vision tunnelled down and down into the black of death.

  The bone hand punctured the roof of Shryke’s mouth, on its slow, inexorable path towards his heart.

  Shryke knew that if the fell hand of this crypt creature reached the beating organ it would rip it out of its bone cage as easily as an eye from a month-dead pig.

  The Sky-Shrine of Thalladon…

  Shryke dismissed the morsel of returning memory.

  This was not the time or place…

  The fist snaked into his throat.

  Shryke felt the muscles of his neck howl in agony.

  He wanted to cough but he was choking. He wanted to gag but was denied even that petty rebellion. The Mother Superior’s mouth, lipless and fleshless, turned from a rictus grimace into a cruel smile of triumph as her vile hand burrowed deeper into him.

  Just die…

  And that’s when the battle-mace smashed into Mother Superior’s spine, snapping the damned bones in half beneath the crimson robes.

  The arm, dislocated from the creature’s shoulder, slithered out of Shryke’s skull and lay writhing in the dirt outside his shelter.

  The creature howled.

  Gathered up its fallen bones, the Mother Superior disappeared with a crackle of lightning and the delicate crash of distant thunder. As the air sizzled and sparked, Shryke saw a striking ebony-skinned woman with braided hair and a gaping stomach wound, holding a battle-mace cradled in her arms like a baby.

  His saviour dropped the mace at her feet.

  As the air rested, the woman disappeared too. Whether blinking into the Quantum Aether or just wa
lking away, Shryke was too lost to tell. She left a dim shadow on the ground—it existed as a doom-laden wraith of darkness that needed no light to cast it. The wraith lingered, a second, two, three, longer, before it dissipated into nothing.

  Shryke fell back. Mouth dry. Head pounding. Heart trying to escape his chest.

  It had been forever since he had seen her.

  So long that he had lost his memories of her to the seasons.

  There were no signs of attack on the freshly killed bodies in the camp.

  It was though death had visited them in the night and gently taken the souls without a struggle.

  There had been much wailing and chest beating alongside the discoveries, but no one spoke of an enemy in the night.

  Not one of the Congregation had witnessed the slaughter, sleeping through the entire Quarternight without waking. The dead had just…died…with no obvious reason or cause. There were no apparent injuries. Some whispered fearfully of poison, but everyone had eaten the same food and drunk the same wine, which made it unlikely.

  Once the shock and the grief had given way to confusion, the mystery surrounding the deaths whispered around the camp. It didn’t take long before the finger of suspicion pointed at Shryke, but as the first eyes fell on him, they saw a sleeper slowly waking, as oblivious to what fell evil had stolen into the Church to claim those souls as the rest of them.

  Reverend Yane regarded the corpses of friends she had loved like her own and felt nothing beyond pain. The dead were like children to her. She had seen them brought into the Church and raised on the Quest. And now saw them as corpses, faces covered by shrouds, carried on biers by dozens of mourners. Her eyes sparkled with tears as she contemplated what she was going to say, knowing that no words could give succour to her people. How was she supposed to assure them of their safety when something like this could happen while they slept? How could a man like Shryke protect them from such evil?

  It was a thought echoed by Carlow, “So much for our protector,” the Curate gloated.

  Yane threw him a bleak look.