by Matt Langley
Galdar felt the hollow of loss and regret—she wanted to argue with Carlow, tell him it wasn’t Shryke’s fault, but the all-enveloping pall of sadness which covered her, stilled the words. There would be enough time for them later.
Galdar looked to the back of the Church as the rest of the Congregation filed in for the service, hoping to see Shryke sitting where he had for the evening service a Quarternight ago. He was not there.
The service was low key and reverential.
Yane spoke of good people called before their time. She talked of God’s will. She reminded them of the fine works completed in the years the dead had been with the Quest. She remembered how all of them, in their own ways had lessened the burdens of others. She shared stories of how they had comforted the scared and lonely. She mourned their deaths but swore that they would not deter those left behind from their sacred mission to locate Safehome. Yane promised that was exactly what those taken in the night would want.
Galdar heard a snort of derision from Carlow. As much as she loathed the pathetic little man, it was hard to deny that Yane’s words felt thin and empty in the shadow of last night. Platitudinous would save them. She would never admit that to Yane, though.
Scanning the Congregation, Galdar looked at the faces of people who had had enough of death and the misery of grief.
She felt the same.
The Congregation parted silently, Carlow walking out with a face of foul thunder.
The bodies were prepared for burial.
Galdar wandered amongst the Congregation. Everyone was silent. A few fires were lit, a few gathered around them, but most sat alone in contemplation or in small circles resting their heads on each other’s shoulders.
A forbidding gloom of grief hung over the clearing.
Galdar just wanted to be free of it.
Shryke lay in his shelter, facing away from the Congregation.
Galdar couldn’t tell if his was awake or asleep.
His small fire had gone out, but she saw the sheen of sweat on his back, as though he burned with fever.
Was that what had happened? Some brutal illness that had swept through the Congregation? A contagion that even now spreading amongst the survivors?
Galdar bent and touched Shryke.
In a startling moment of explosive movement, the assassin was up off his bedding, had Galdar by the throat, swept her feet out from beneath her and slammed her into the ground, the razor-sharp edge of his black blade at her throat.
“Stop!” Galdar choked out, desperately hoping that no one in the Congregation had seen them.
Shryke blinked. She saw it in his eyes. He hadn’t been here. In that moment he snapped back into the now.
He relaxed the point of the sword and sank back onto his haunches, before he cast the sword aside and rubbed his eyes.
Was that sweat he wiped away or tears?
Galdar couldn’t tell.
When his hands came away from his face, she saw his bloodshot eyes. The skin around them was raw.
Shryke was uncomfortable with her gaze on him. He got up and turned away. “What do you want?”
“I came to see how you were. Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
Shryke still couldn’t or wouldn’t make eye contact with Galdar.
She got up and rested a hand on his back again. She felt him stiffen against her touch, but it was his only reaction.
“Why can’t you look at me?”
“I can hear you. Isn’t that enough?”
Galdar was confused. Shryke seemed so…vulnerable. It was unsettling. This wasn’t the man she had come to know on their journey. She moved around him, standing on his bedding and looking up at his face. Still, Shryke avoided her eyes. She touched his cheek.
His hand came up and grabbed her palm, not to share in the comfort but to deliberately take her fingers away from his skin.
“I don’t want to be touched,” he said quietly.
“What happened? Why have you changed? What did you see last night?”
“Nothing. I haven’t. I was asleep. I saw nothing.”
“You are accustomed to death, Shryke. I’m not a fool. I know that. Death is your life. I don’t believe for one second that five people dying, people you don’t know and have no connection to, is going to twist you like this. So, tell me, Shryke. Tell me what has changed?”
Shryke took a step back, still avoiding Galdar’s concerned gaze. “Bad dreams.” He said, which was no kind of answer at all.
Galdar took the plunge; if he wasn’t going to talk to her because they were friends, or possibly more, then perhaps if she goaded him, she might get the answers she wanted? “Children complain about bad dreams. Not warriors.”
She got a reaction, but not the one she had expected.
Shryke pushed past her, retreating into his makeshift shelter. He buried his head in his hands and wept.
Later, after Galdar had relit his fire, warmed him some soup in a crude bowl, and the sobbing was reduced to memory, Shryke took the proffered food and sat cross-legged with her in the entrance to the shelter. He was embarrassed by his earlier show of emotion.
“I do not cry easily,” the assassin said.
Galdar sipped her soup. She nodded rather than interrupt.
“Truth be told, I can’t remember the last time I cried. Perhaps it was when I was boy… in the first days after I was separated from my parents and taken to the Guild Nest for training.” He shook his head. “I don’t remember. The years have stolen those early days from me. If I did cry, then it was through grief and loneliness. I was in a strange world, forever changed. I could never go back to being who I was. I would never be that innocent boy again. But today I was not crying from sadness, nor loneliness.” He leaned forward, his voice sounding so much weaker than it had in all the days she had known him. “I wept with fear, Galdar. Fear. Stone cold fear. And that is something I have not felt since it was battered out of me during my training. Fear is a luxury. Fear makes a warrior hesitate. Fear allows doubt. Fear kills men like me. I do not fear… and yet… I was afraid.”
Shryke took a sip from the soup cooling in his bowl.
She was no longer hungry.
He used the moment to collect himself, slowing his racing mind.
Galdar took a sip of her own soup.
“Last night, I dreamed that death visited me here. I dreamed that its hateful face and cold hatred invaded not just this clearing, and your Congregation. It was inside my flesh. I dreamed death reached inside my body, cold fingers clawing deep within the tissue and muscle in search of my heart—and I knew it was going to tear it out of my chest and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I felt that chill hand inside me.” The fear was there in his eyes as he shared the memory. This was no mere nightmare he recounted. “If the woman hadn’t woken me in that moment I would have died. Not only in my dream state, but here, in this woodland. She saved me.”
“What woman?”
“She was tall. Striking. Some might say beautiful. Her skin was ebony black, so perfect it shone like silver in the moonlight. She wore her hair in fierce warrior braids. She shook me from my dream and saved my life.”
Galdar’s confusion must have been evident on her face because Shryke lowered the bowl from his lips without taking a second sup. “What?”
She shook her head. “There’s no one like you described in the Congregation.”
“Impossible,” she was here, “look.”
Shryke put the bowl down and scrambled back to reach under his bedding for some half-buried treasure. “She left this.” Shryke placed the battle-mace in Galdar’s hands. “She was here,” he insisted.
Chapter 18
Barl wasn’t sure exactly how long Summer slept before the Medipac fell away from her body, but is was long enough for him to sleep, wake, sleep, wake and sleep again. It felt longer than it was because he’d been unable to find any sort of toilet in the escape-capsule and b
een forced to improvise. He didn’t feel good about his solution, but it was better than the alternative.
He had tried to calm himself enough to open a wound in the air and weave a sense memory of yellowberries so that he might get some sort of sustenance, but no matter how fiercely he willed it, there was no sudden feeling of weight in the air, and nothing appeared on his upturned palms.
Fear had robbed him of any power.
Fear of the red-robed skeleton.
The Mother Superior, a voice whispered in the recesses of his mind. He had no idea where it came from, or how it named the demon death, but he did not doubt the veracity of those three little words.
When Summer finally awoke, Barl was hungry and weak from thirst.
The first words out of her mouth, weak and phlegmy, were, “What is that damned smell?”
Barl pointed with some embarrassment at the locker he’d been using at a cess-pit.
“I couldn’t find a toilet.”
Summer stood slowly and rubbed at her face vigorously to restore circulation and wake herself up. “Bantoscree don’t need them.”
“Surely they…?”
“They excrete gas. And right now, I’m wishing you did the same.”
Summer went to the locker, opened it, made a sign in the air, uttered a few brusque words through gritted teeth, and Barl’s waste disappeared. She kicked the locker closed, stretching her back, “How, long was I out?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “A long time.”
Summer nodded. She looked up through the porthole, making a few quick calculations in her head. “Hungry?”
Barl nodded.
With a word and a turn of the wrist, several meaty sandwiches and waxy fruit appeared before Barl. With her other hand, Summer wove two pitchers—one of wine, one of fruit juice, and two ornate goblets. They would not die here, he realised, tucking in greedily to what felt like a feast.
He heard a whoosh in the air behind him.
When he looked, there was a crude toilet with a curtain rail above it.
Barl looked at Summer. Summer looked at Barl and shrugged. “Don’t flush while in space dock,” she grinned, and he couldn’t help but laugh.
The food was good; Summer ate sparingly, rubbing the stitches in her stomach as she did so, obviously still in pain despite the fact her wounds appeared almost healed. She picked up the Medipac, spun a few dials on it and began to run her finger along several lines of read out. She sucked in her breath. “I was lucky, kid.” She didn’t need to elaborate. If he hadn’t got to the Medipac when he did, she’d have been stinking the place up worse than his waste, and he’d be slowly starving to death.
Grimly she put the Medipac down. “Go on, ask.”
Barl stopped in mid-chew.
He hadn’t really wanted to think about what happened, but now it all came rushing back. The horrific skull, the skinned arm reaching down through his body…
“What was that thing?”
“I don’t know. I can guess, though. It was bad magic.”
“Bad…?”
“Yes. And powerful at that. That creature wasn’t really here, not in the physical sense, but it had enough corporality to get inside you and rip out half my guts.”
Barl shivered. He put down the sandwich. Suddenly he was no longer hungry.
“But there’s a more interesting question,” Summer said.
“There is?”
“Yes. Who sent it, and why go to so much trouble to kill you?”
“Me?”
“Yes. You. They weren’t looking for me. The attack on the ship was one thing, in the grand scheme of things it could have been any of many causes, but you survived…”
“Thanks to you.”
“Thanks to me. Yes. And don’t you forget it,” Summer ruffled Barl’s hair and gave him a wide white smile. “So, they sent something else to finish their dirty work. Not a whole human, but enough of one. That can only mean it was projected from an incredible distance, or it would have had all the skin it required.”
Barl was confused.
“To send a whole Assassin over extreme distances requires an enormous amount of power. If you don’t send the whole Assassin, but just enough of it—half in the reality, half out of it—then you have considerably more chance of it getting to where you need it. Remember what I told you on the training deck about how much it costs to create the energy for magic?”
Barl nodded. “Yes. You transported me here when the Minular exploded didn’t you? That’s why you were unconscious and bleeding when I got here, right?”
“Exactly that. It almost wiped me out.”
“Your eyes bled.”
“Which is not a good thing. My strength was so depleted I had nothing left to protect you with against that thing. I got lucky.”
“I reckon we’ve used up our luck for a while.”
“A couple of lifetimes’ worth, at least,” Summer agreed.
Barl had another question, one that he probably wouldn’t want to hear the answer to, but he needed to ask it. “Are we going to die here?”
“Not if I can help it.” Summer said. “We’re still light-years from Pantonyle in deep interstellar space, if my calculations are even close to right. The problem is escape capsules have no motive power of their own, except for thrusters to get them down safely onto a planet. So, as we’re not near any planets, the thrusters aren’t going to help us. There are communication arrays in the capsule, but nothing that will cover the range we need—the emergency beacon will have tripped, but that does have a hyperspace component, so I’m not convinced the beacon will reach far enough to tag a ship—even if it’s heard by one willing to get involved.”
“That doesn’t sound promising.”
“Sorry about that,” Summer picked up a goblet of wine and took a healthy swallow. Smacking her lips, she said, “Good job we haven’t used up two lifetimes’ worth of luck already, eh?”
Days passed slowly in the escape capsule.
Days where Summer healed and grew stronger. Days where Barl became more convinced that the space in which they were trapped was poorly named. They could no longer see the Minular. Summer explained that this was a safety measure. “When star-ships are destroyed there’s a lot of dirty energy expelled from reactors and weapons arrays. The escape capsules are as shielded as they can be for their size but need to put distance between the wreckage and themselves if the dirty energy isn’t going to undermine their integrity, so they are jettisoned in the direction of the nearest planet.”
“Does that mean we’re heading towards a planet?”
“It does. But you’ll be very dead by the time we reach it. A thousand years give or take, at our current speed.”
They occupied themselves with Barl’s continued training.
“Time for you to be a modern man, Barl. Hunt and gather,” Summer laughed, turning his palms up and pushing his elbows in. Barl tried his hardest, willing any sort of sustenance to take shape in his hands, but on the few occasions it did work the only food he could scavenge were yellowberries, and rather than satisfy him, his constant failures and half-successes only served to frustrate and exhaust him.
After yet another frustrating attempt in which Barl could only manage to conjure sweat and bitter bile at his failure, he sat down heavily on a crash-couch and asked Summer to tell him not how to weave magic, but what it actually was.
“In all honesty, we don’t know. Some people are born with the ability, sometimes they find out for themselves, which seldom ends well. They end up killing themselves by accident or starting wars. The lucky ones might make a fortune in a casino and think they’re just very lucky. Less often, the Guild pick up flavours and indicators of someone with the first primitive stirrings of talent. Like you. For some reason God’s Heart has a propensity for creating magicians and mages. We don’t know why that is. But we keep Guild ships in the vicinity and when that…flavour…that taste emanates…we go in and…”
“Kidnap…�
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“Rescue.”
“I can’t say that I feel particularly rescued.”
“It’s a better word than extricated. Seriously, kid, imagine if this power had come to you unbidden? I’ve seen kids just like you who’ve gone out of their minds because they diced their parents up in a fit of anger because they gave them extra chores to do in the kitchen. This stuff is dangerous. A thought. A word. The will behind it. It’s even more dangerous because we don’t know where it comes from, or why it’s there or what it’s for. We’ve had priests and scientists working on it for thousands of years. The magic seems to be a fundamental force of the universe. We haven’t found a limit to these magics yet, just to the energy required. If you have enough energy, we suspect, we can do anything.”
“Anything?”
“Then why don’t we put our energies together? Now. See if we can get out of this mess?”
Summer was taken aback. “Together?”
“Yes. We’ve both been resting for a week. You’re healed and when you first took me, I jumped to three different worlds, remember?”
“They were close by.”
“But I jumped, yes?”
Summer considered.
“Out of control and with little direction, but yes. You jumped worlds.”
Barl held out his hand. “Then let’s see where we can jump … together.”
Chapter 19
Galdar led the disbelieving Shryke among the defeated and heart-wounded Congregation.
Unless he set eyes on all of them, she knew he would never accept the truth: the woman who he described, the one who had saved him and left behind the battle-mace, was not one of their number.
Galdar tried to hold Shryke’s hand, but he was having none of it. “I’m not a child.” So, she settled for sliding her arm through his as they walked, selfishly enjoying the closeness that afforded.
Shryke, for all his warrior’s power and physicality, shivered beside her. And though the woodland was chilly, it was not from the cold. Galdar felt it pass from his frame into hers as they moved. She squeezed his arm with hers. He would settle, grimly walking on, looking from face to face in search of the ebony skinned warrior with her braids. She couldn’t imagine what manner of threat could transform the man who was a colossus of a fighter into a shadow of himself? The change both appalled and fascinated Galdar.