by Matt Langley
‘Remember piggy-backing?’
Although Summer walked away from him down the sloped side of the small hill, and was swinging her sword to loosen her shoulders, her voice appeared in Barl’s mind as it had done in the corridors of the Minular.
“Yes.”
‘Think it. Don’t say it.’
Yes.
‘Good. Fight.’
Barl ran to catch up with Summer and they launched themselves in the throng as if hand-to-hand combat was their only purpose in life.
And fight they did.
Barl felt his hands coming together in a two-fisted grip on the sword. It was as though he had always been a warrior. He was made for this. With one fluid movement, he parried a wild clubbing blow from a Dog-face, then rolled his shoulder and adjusted his stance to hack at the back of both its knees, slicing them open with the razor-sharp edge of black steel. The creature stumbled and fell, howling balefully up at the grey skies above.
Barl hadn’t thought about any of that.
It was all instinctual.
A huge titan moved to block his way. The creature was seven-foot tall and towered over him. It was impossible to tell if its horns were part of a helmet or grew out of the side of its head.
Barl struck. He let muscle memory guide him, dancing through a thousand cuts, each one blisteringly fast, like lightning never striking the same place twice, until he opened the titan’s belly and spilled its guts out onto the field of blood.
It went down with a howling crash.
Ahead of him, Summer cleaved a path through the endless tide of attackers, opening flesh with cruel precision, cleaving heads from shoulders and dispatching justice with staggering skill. The woman was a true warrior.
Barl heard her words inside his head again.
She pulled him under her shield to protect him from the worst of the fire raging down from dragons overhead. The heat shrivelled the flesh of the burning warriors it left in its wake, turning bone to ash.
‘The Plain exists as a reservoir of energy. If you want to take something physically or magically away from here, you must expend the requisite amount first. Pay to play. The only way to get out is to be killed, and if you get killed too soon…’
You don’t take enough energy out with you?
‘Nice going kid, maybe you’re not as stupid as you look.’
They fought side by side. Summer the aggressor, leading, piggybacking to give Barl the fighting skills to dispatch the enemies where they stood. But even with her inside him, Barl was tiring. He wore a dozen cuts across his body, but none life threatening. With Summer’s help he was holding his own against ancient warriors.
Through the throng of combatants, Barl saw the endpoint of their journey: on a small hill stood a lone woman in blue robes. Her hair was golden, and around her neck, there were a complex chain of necklaces and symbols. She seemed incredibly vulnerable where she stood in the midst of the battle.
Both her hands were empty.
She didn’t need a weapon.
As Barl watched, a phalanx of bloodied warriors rose from the throng and charged at her. Within two seconds, they were smouldering corpses slithering back down the slope of the hill into the bloody mire.
Barl hadn’t seen her move her hands.
All the woman had done, as far as he could tell, was look at them and they’d erupted in flames, their spines tearing bloodily, intact, from the backs of their leather armour to writhe like snakes in the mud, the men themselves still blissfully unaware that they were dead.
By the time Summer and Barl reached the hill the spines had stopped moving and the woman with the golden hair was once again looking at the ground around her.
Barl began to climb, swallowing down his revulsion as he realised it wasn’t a hill at all. It was a mound made entirely from the dead vertebrae of warrior’s spines. They rolled and clicked under his feet, squirming in grey meat and white gristle.
As he climbed, Barl tried to stop sour bile rising in his throat.
He failed.
Summer knelt before the woman, and tugged Barl’s sleeve down to do the same.
“Summer,” said the woman, “So, you have returned?”
“Afraid so. It’s all getting a bit intense out there.”
“When is it not?”
“Good point. Well made.”
The woman smiled, but still didn’t look at Barl or Summer.
“What do you require?”
“A hyperspace spell, something with enough juice to transmit our escape capsule to Pantonyle.”
The woman considered.
“You wish to combine your energies with the boy?”
“Yes. Frankly it was his idea. He’s saved my life—saving me a trip here—so he’s already on a roll.”
The battled wore on around them as the Familiar considered her decision. The foetid sun refused to move nearer to the horizon. They could have been waiting a week or a second before the woman spoke again.
“Very well.”
‘Hang on kid. This is gonna hurt.’
But.
The woman looked at him.
Barl felt his spine burst out from his back as his body was washed in flame.
Barl’s eyes snapped open in the escape capsule.
His back blazed with agony remembered and his skin burned red raw, but he was not on fire, and his spine was still very much there beneath his skin. The agony was merely the residual memory of what had happened on The Plain.
Summer’s eyes blinked open.
She squeezed his hand.
The Guild soldiers opened the escape capsule with cutting codespells and brute force.
As the doors came off and the warm air surrounding the Nest rushed in, Barl had time to register a purple, livid sky, and a high, twisted building made from a filigree of gold. He saw a tall thin beast, walking on three legs and heard words emerging sluggishly from its strange mouth.
Barl was pulled from the wreck of the capsule along with Summer.
Summer bled again from the nose and eyes.
As the breeze hit his cheeks and he felt the blood drying stiffly on the skin, Barl realised that he was, too.
“Welcome to the Guild Nest on Pantonyle,” said the three-legged beast, “You are Barl?”
All he could manage was a nod at first, but he realised words were needed. He tried to explain himself. “Yes. I’ve journeyed from God’s Heart for the Test.”
The beast’s stern face broke into a dazzling smile.
“The journey was the test,” said the beast, turning and walking into the Nest. It added: “My sincerest congratulations, young Barl. You passed.”
Chapter 21
The horse pelted through the darkening wood, weaving a path between he gnarled boles of tree trunks without care for the low hanging branches that could have thrown Galdar from its back. She rode low, clutching the animal’s neck as it swerved through boughs, trying everything she knew to calm the terrified animal.
She got her hands onto the reins and used the bridle to steer her mount as best she could through safer gaps between the trees, on the cusp of anger at Carlow’s betrayal and the desperation against losing sight of Shryke’s horse.
The words of the ebony skinned warrior woman rang in her ears. What was the Sun-Machine? What Dreaming Armies? What was so terrible about the raw patch of skin on Shryke’s neck that he was going to die if she didn’t attend to it—and how was she supposed to attend to it? She wasn’t a doctor or a nurse. She had no skills with herbs or medicines.
The gloom descended as they raced through the trees.
Full night fell like a bad headache.
Up through the undergrowth she occasionally caught a glimpse of the Overloop; milky grey and dotted with clouds. Years ago, when the Quest had started its journey around that link, Galdar had been a toddler, but even now she remembered the wide plains, the deserts and oases of that quadrant of the Link. She’d been born there to parents who themselves were born a link and
a half away. There were bright days, cold nights and the endless sand. Always the sand. Her parents spun her stories of other links. The Dragons and the Airships, the sailing barges and the golden canals, but all of that seemed so very far away. Now she had been tasked to stay with Shryke—to help him and keep him alive, and to do so without experience to guide her. Her! Weak and tiny Galdar! With her big mouth and her short temper. The Links of Chainworld, even those of the misty Overloop were more substantial and stronger than the links stretching now between her, the Congregation, and her past.
She thought, for a moment, about stopping the horse, turning in her tracks and going back to where she had last belonged—the Congregation.
What help could she be out here to a terrified warrior on the run from people who could step right out of the air to kill him?
She began to tense the reins, summoning the courage to give up, which took more strength than she had. Knowing that she was about to lose Shryke forever, she couldn’t pull back on the reins. Up ahead, Shryke’s beast cleared the treeline and galloped towards the crashing waters of the fast-flowing river that bisected the valley, his unconscious form bouncing and shaking on the animal’s back.
The river was too deep for the horse to walk across, but that didn’t stop the animal from entering the water. It began to swim. Lashed across the saddle, Shryke’s head was submerged again and again beneath the water only to rise up as the horse’s gait lifted it clear. The river was wide, and the horse was not a quick swimmer—if Galdar didn’t reach him soon Shryke’s neck wound wouldn’t be the death of him. He’d drown first.
Galdar kicked her horse on, bursting from the treeline into the chill moonlit air of the valley. Using her knees, she guided the animal towards the river.
Galdar brought the steed to a halt on the bank and jumped down wading into the water.
The river was fast flowing and freezing. It churned a channel down from the heights of the Thalladon Climbs. The sheer shock of the temperature drop forced a gasp from her lungs and made her swallow a mouthful of foaming water instead of a breath. Coughing and spitting, she clawed at the river ever more insistently.
The frightened horse up ahead seemed to dance sideways in the current, half of Shryke’s face visible.
She rode the current until the burning in her lings subsided, letting the undertow do the work for her until she caught up with Shryke and with fast hands, lifted Shryke’s head clear of the water.
The wound on his neck glistened blackly in the moonlight.
It leaked thin bubbles of pus.
Pushing the thought of it from her mind, Galdar kicked along with the horse until they reached the opposite bank. The horse climbed out easily, dragging Shryke up with it. Galdar grabbed at its leathers before the animal could run off again and attempted to sooth it with quiet whispers in its fluttering ears. The animal’s breath came hard, nostrils flaring. It was still skittish. Her non-words, and soft, soothing hands stroking at its coat eventually did calm the animal down and enough that Galdar was able to tie the leather reins to a bush. Her own mount grazed on the other bank, seemingly content with its lot in life so long as there was grass enough to feed on.
She checked Shryke’s airways, and once she was sure he was breathing, Galdar dived directly back into the river, and swam to the back to retrieve her horse.
Once back with Shryke, she unlashed the assassin and eased him down gently from the saddle.
Galdar rolled him in a dirty, stinking, woollen blanket she’d retrieved from a roll on the saddle. It had survived the crossing under an oilskin, which had kept it dry enough for what she needed from it.
The animals were Raider’s horses. The Assassins wouldn’t have come through on the animals, she reasoned, which mean they had appropriated them as spoils. How many more Raiders lay dead behind them? How many were left to hunt Shryke to avenge the death and Assassin’s doom he had brought upon them, if any?
They needed a fire, and they needed it soon.
She rummaged in the sodden saddlebags for an oilskin-covered tinderbox, still dry and ready to be struck.
Once she had a fire lit and warming them both, she wrapped herself in a corner of the blanket and used the light from the fire to examine Shryke. There was a fearful bruise on the side of his head from where he’d been kicked unconscious. The area around his eye was already swelling blackly and seemed ripe enough to burst.
Galdar examined Shryke’s neck. The scab was black and cracking through to weeping red flesh beneath. She probed it tenderly. Dark fluid seeped onto her fingertip—burning a little on her skin. She told herself it was the cold.
She wiped rank liquid on the blanket and went back to the scab.
Trying to keep the unbroken crusts beneath her fingers, she pushed down again. She was no anatomist, but she thought she could feel out a harder lump of something beneath the surface. It seemed to squirm against her touch. She had no idea what to do about it. Whether it was to be removed or lanced or fed upon by leeches?
Galdar felt helpless again.
It dismayed her even more to see that the ooze she had wiped from the wound onto the blanket had eaten through the fabric, leaving holes as if it had been eaten by moths.
What was inside Shryke’s neck?
Secondsun came with a pounding of hoof beats and wild yells that woke Galdar from a nightmare-filled sleep of pursuit, illness and death.
Shryke was still asleep. He didn’t stir beside her. Was this new inertia part of whatever thing festered within his neck? So much sleep was unnatural, surely?
Should she wake him?
Galdar stood.
The hoof beats thundered closer. For a moment she’d dared to hope they belonged to their own mounts, that somehow, they had slipped their tethers, but that hope died the second she saw the black team of Raiders gathering on the opposite bank. She shook Shryke’s shoulder, hard. He murmured, his lips twitching, but merely rolled over. He didn’t wake.
“Wake up, Shryke! Please! Wake up!”
Nothing.
“Galdar! Don’t run!” The voice carried easily across the still morning waters. It was a voice she recognised. And loathed.
Carlow.
She squinted in the still too-bright light, shielding her eyes from the cold sun to see the man she’d once thought she might marry astride one of the horses. He wasn’t a good rider. He had no mastery of the animal. The reins, she saw, were being held in the hand of another Raider while Carlow was bound by the hands to the saddle’s pommel. Looking down, she realised his legs were lashed to the stirrups.
Carlow’s face was a mess of blood and bruises where he’d been beaten. His surplus was stained red and there were two tears in the shoulder as though he’d been stabbed there.
“You can’t get away,” he yelled, desperation in his voice. The last word ended in a brutal hacking cough.
The lead Raider led his horse to the water’s edge and called across the river, his voice steely with certainty. “And, believe me, girl if you try, I’ll cut your young friend’s throat and happily watch him bleed out.”
She was tempted to say Carlow was no friend of hers.
Every Raider was dead.
Blood, thick with clots and torn flesh ran through the coarse grass down into the water. From there it ran away in an oily slick of violence and pain.
The stench of death hung in the air like an accusation. Dead eyes looked up to the sky, still surprised in death. Slack mouths, broken and crushed, echoed the screams of their owner’s last agonies. Hands, dead and frozen, grasped blackly for reprieve.
Galdar was on her knees in the blood.
Suddenly coming to, she dropped the battle-mace as if it had bitten her hand and scrambled away from it through the sticky grass.
She slid over the body of a slaughtered Raider and his dead horse.
Her hands and forearms were caked in gore; she felt stipples of it drying on her face in the gentle morning breeze.
Galdar only came to rest whe
n she bumped into Shryke’s unyielding body.
“What…what are you?”
Galdar looked up, wildly, ready to run.
Carlow, still wet from being dragged across the river, still bound by wrists and ankles, stared at Galdar with awe and fear.
“What…are you?” he repeated.
Galdar hugged herself. Thirty or more corpses surrounded her and Shryke like the petals of sick flower. Blooming death.
“You just… that mace…and you killed them all. Everyone. No mercy. You were murder made flesh.”
Galdar struggled to grasp what Carlow was saying.
The last thing she remembered was Carlow on the opposite bank being cut down from his horse and being dragged into the water.
Then…
Flashes.
Screams.
Darkness.
Bones.
Blood.
Silence.
“They killed everyone we knew.”
Galdar blinked. “What?”
“The Raiders. They arrived just after you left on the horse. They killed everyone, Reverend Yane, Lastag. Jacka. Everyone. They only kept me alive to use against you… They were going to kill me when you picked up that…mace…and…”
Galdar fell sideways. A wrenching moan of anguish dredging up from her guts and blasting from her sick, raw throat. The wail echoed off the surrounding hills, running through the trees, scattering the birds into the air, and the animals through the woodland, running for their burrows.
She murdered the silence like she had murdered the Raiders.
“Galdar?”
Shryke stirred.
His eyes opened.
“Galdar…what’s happened? Where are we?”
But she had no words.
She cried into Shryke’s chest, the sobs shaking both their bodies and all Shryke could do was put his arms around her.
Chapter 22
“The Guild Nest has been on Pantonyle, the seventeenth moon of the Gas Giant Hanshavo Prime for seven millennia. The origins are not clear since the Archives of the Lost were destroyed.”