by Philip Reeve
Night’s Edge was no exception. The old glass towers stood abandoned between the platforms, and around their feet more modest structures had sprung up. There were Deeka lodges like fat little clay ovens, and Chmoii tents, and the rambling scruffy shelters of the Hath. There were Herastec longhouses, which always had one open side, because the Herastec had evolved on a world that was all prairie and hated to be enclosed for too long. There was an open space between the buildings where colored lights had been strung, perhaps to obscure the pale ghost-light from the creepers on the ruins, and there were food stalls and a Deeka bar selling whiffs of intoxicating gas, and small pools where the Hath stood like grounded kites with their feet in baths of tasty nutrients.
“Look — there are Kraitt here!” said one of Koth/Atalaí, as they made their way between groups of squatting Deeka and Herastec pairs standing quietly at tables piled with subtly flavored grasses. None of the beings Zen and Nova had yet met upon the Web used chairs, but the Kraitt looked as if they might; Zen felt a thrill of recognition when he first caught sight of them, moving through the crowds on the far side of the square. They looked almost human at first; they were the first living things he had seen in nine months who had two arms and two legs and one head and kept them all in more or less the right places. But as they drew closer — watching him with their yellow eyes just as intently as he was watching them — he saw that they were as alien in their own way as any of the rest.
There must have been a planet somewhere where dinosaurs had evolved, and no asteroid had dropped in to wipe them out, so they had gone on evolving and turned into the Kraitt: muscular, man-sized lizards with flat faces and wide mouths, and a lot of crests and spines and fins that might be part of their clothes or part of themselves, it was hard to tell. One was taller than the rest, and Zen thought at first that it had wings, but it turned out to be just a leather cape, with a wide red collar that framed the creature’s clever, reptile face.
“There is a female with them,” said Koth (or Atalaí). “That is good.”
“The males are less intelligent,” said Atalaí (or Koth). “They make trouble without a female to lead them.”
“They sound a lot like humans,” said Nova.
The Kraitt matriarch came closer, with two of her males behind her. Her amber eyes were cold and curious, and her voice was a collection of snarls and hisses that must somehow have formed words in the Web’s trade tongue, because a translation appeared in Zen’s view.
“You are the Ambassadors for Humans. We have heard news of you. Very interesting things.”
Nova gave her usual speech, about how she and Zen were exploring on behalf of the Network Empire, which would soon be ready to open trade with the worlds of the Web.
“Yes,” agreed the Kraitt, baring her gleaming teeth in what looked to Zen very much like a sarcastic smile. “Soon you will go home through your gate on Yaarm, and return with trains full of more people like you.”
“It is not unusual for a new race to send envoys onto the Web long before it opens its gate for trade,” said Koth/Atalaí, and then fell silent. Zen glanced at the Herastec and saw that they were both standing very stiffly with their heads held high, alarmed by the closeness of this toothy predator.
The Kraitt ignored them. “When your traders come,” she said, “tell them not to bother with these prey species. They should trade with the Kraitt. We are not bound by the old fears and the old customs, as they are. We are a young race, like you, and the young races are the future of the Web. We are very interested in your technology…”
She lingered over that word, and her eyes slid from Zen to Nova. For a moment Zen was afraid that she had guessed what Nova was, but perhaps it was just a coincidence; perhaps there was nothing sinister in the way her black tongue flickered between her teeth while she looked Nova up and down.
“I am the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss,” she said. “You should come to my home station on the Shards of Kharne. If you are not too eager to go home…”
And again there was that hint of sarcasm about the way she said “home,” as if she knew full well that Zen and Nova never could go there. But she couldn’t know, Zen told himself; she couldn’t possibly have guessed that much about them. It must just be that she was more humanoid than the people he was used to; he was reading human meanings into expressions and body language that probably meant something quite different to the Kraitt.
“We’ll think about it,” said Nova sweetly. “We still haven’t decided where we’re going next.”
The Tzeld Gekh Karneiss suddenly tipped her head back to bare the soft, leathery folds of her throat. Perhaps it was the equivalent of bowing, if you were a Kraitt. Then she turned and went away, with her males behind her.
“Well, she seemed nice,” said Nova.
The Herastec shivered inside their robes.
They moved on through the busy square, through the scents from the alien food stalls. Koth/Atalaí were greeted by another Herastec pair and went off to drink three-leaf broth with them and swap gossip about their complicated clans. Nova, who could eat things for their taste without having to worry about digesting them, bought a slab of spiced bread from a Chmoii kitchen, but Zen had tried some of that on Yashtey and still remembered its side effects. They sat down together with their backs against the wall of a Deeka lodge while Nova ate the bread and drew things in the dust.
“So this is the Web of Worlds,” she said. “It’s like a big snowflake. It started here, on the homeworld of the Railmakers. They made a bunch of lines that led from there to hub-worlds, and from those more lines go out to other hubs, where lots of lines branch off, forming the different networks — the Herastec Network, the Human Network. Only I can’t draw all those here, because it’s a three-dimensional shape, fractal and amazingly complex… And the middle part is just guesswork, because that whole section, the inner hubs and the center, is all lost, hidden in the Black Light Zone…” She wiped out the center of her diagram and stared at what was left. “We have no idea what’s in there.”
“Why do we care?” asked Zen. “It’s just history.”
“History is interesting,” said Nova. “Don’t you want to know how all this started? Who the Railmakers were?”
Zen shrugged. “Not really.”
He could be disappointing sometimes. Nova wondered if she should tell him about the whisper coming from the Black Light Zone. She couldn’t even find the right word for it, let alone make him understand. She sought for some way to catch his interest.
“What if there was a way home?” she asked.
“Home?”
Zen had trained himself to stop thinking about home. At first, he had not been able to think of anything else, but it had been too painful; he had stopped himself, and slowly the nagging ache of it had faded, driven from his thoughts by Nova and the strange new places they had traveled to.
“We can’t go home,” he said uneasily, wondering how she could have forgotten. “We’re criminals, remember?”
Nova shrugged. “Half the corporate families started out as criminals of some sort. Once people realize what we’ve found here and the trade that could be done with the Web of Worlds, they’d soon forgive us.”
“But they wouldn’t ever realize, would they? We’d never get a chance to tell them because the Guardians will be watching Raven’s gate and as soon as we go back through it they’ll stomp on us. They’ve been lying to everyone for centuries, claiming they made the gates. They’re hardly going to let us tell the truth.”
“That is a worry,” said Nova. “You’re right — we couldn’t go back through Raven’s gate. But what if we could find another? What if we could find a gate that led to a busier world, where people would notice us as soon as we arrived? The Guardians couldn’t blow us off the tracks if we were on Grand Central or somewhere. It would be all over the news sites.”
“But how could we get to Grand Cent
ral?”
“Maybe not Grand Central itself. But the Web of Worlds must have been linked to our Network at some stage, long ago,” said Nova. “Remember the walls Raven told me about, the walls they found on Marapur when they were building the new station city? Those must have been Railmaker structures. I bet there were lines that used to link our network with the Railmakers’ hubs, deep in the Black Light Zone. The Guardians have hidden the gates on human worlds, but what if we could find the other end, and go through anyway?”
“You mean go into the Black Light Zone?”
“Why not?”
“But you heard what the Herastec said. Trains won’t go there.”
“Morvah won’t go there. They have some instinctive phobia. But the Damask Rose isn’t a morvah.”
Zen shifted uncomfortably. It seemed to him that the morvah might have good reasons to shun the Black Light Zone. He had heard enough about it to share their fear. Something terrible had happened there. So far, the Web of Worlds had turned out to be a much less frightening place than he had expected; he had met no monsters, no poison-planets or hideous diseases. But it seemed to him that all those things might be waiting for him among the sunless homeworlds of the Railmakers. The Herastec and the Deeka might not be as technologically smart as humans, but they weren’t stupid, and you didn’t find them trying to get into the Zone.
He didn’t want to admit to Nova that the idea scared him, though. He still had too much of his old street-kid pride for that. So he said, “It wouldn’t work. Even if we found a way home, the Guardians killed the story about the walls on Marapur, and they’d kill us too. They aren’t ever going to let news about the Web of Worlds leak out. So there’s no point risking the Black Light Zone.”
“All right,” said Nova.
But it wasn’t all right. They’d often had disagreements while they had been traveling, even little arguments sometimes, but this felt different; it was the first time the two of them had wanted two different things, and it made them both feel sad.
The Damask Rose broke in, her voice coming simultaneously into Zen’s headset and Nova’s mind. “Zen? Nova? I am being pestered.”
“Pestered?” asked Zen.
“By hooligans,” said the train, and she showed them the feed from her hull cameras. Some Kraitt were creeping around on the siding where she was parked for the night. They gawked up at her painted hull and reached out with clawed hands to try her carriage doors. From time to time one looked right at a camera and his eyes shone yellow.
“What are they up to?” Zen wondered.
“There’s no sign of the Tzeld Gekh Karneiss,” said Nova.
“We should get back there and see what’s happening…”
“But carefully. They might be dangerous.”
They stood up and made their way back through the marketplace. As they passed Koth/Atalaí and their friends, Nova called out to say that they were returning to their train because they thought the Kraitt might be making trouble. Then they were hurrying past the weed-clad buttresses of the Railmaker ruins, heading downhill to the sidings. Below them the dark sea boomed, patched here and there with flickering light where a Night Swimmer drifted near the surface. The path twisted steeply between jags of rock and wind-hissing vegetation. In the shadows just off it Zen saw a pair of eyes catch the starlight and shine like twin lamps.
“Nova,” he said, “there’s—”
Something hit him hard from behind. He fell and rolled and scrambled up, stunned, indignant, wondering who to hit. Kraitt were emerging from the shadows all around. Nova was struggling with two of them. They seemed surprised by her strength. Zen heard the splintering dry-branch crack of snapped bone as she broke one’s arm, but his scream brought more running. They carried a net, which made slinking metal noises when they threw it over her. Zen ran at them, but one turned and saw him, and something like a club swept around at knee height and tripped him, slamming his face into the dirt again. A tail, he thought, as he rolled out of the way of scuffling feet. He had not noticed till then that the Kraitt had tails.
Nova was trussed in the net, which one of the Kraitt carried over his shoulder. Zen caught a glimpse of her face as she was swung past him, the Kraitt all around her, hurrying down the path. He heard her voice in his headset: “Zen, no, don’t try to fight them; there are too many, they’re too fierce…”
“Help!” he shouted, giving chase. The Kraitt moved fast, their knees bending the wrong way as they ran. They crossed a bridge, heading toward one of the outer sidings where a morvah waited under the glow of the rail-yard lamps.
Morvah tended to resemble their owners. Herastec morvah were gentle, with long, backswept horns, while those bred on the Deeka worlds had fins and gills. This Kraitt morvah looked like a prehistoric reptile, armor plated and bristling with spines. Its front end was sheathed in rusty metal, from which more spines and tusks jutted. Its three carriages were armored in the same haphazard way, with scruffy little forts on their roofs where more Kraitt stood. The train was already moving, and the Kraitt who had captured Nova started running to keep up with it. The ones on the roof cheered them on. Others leaned from doors and windows, reaching out helping claws. Nova thrashed in the net like a landed fish, making one last desperate bid to break free, but the mesh was too strong.
Zen ran hard and flung himself at the rearmost of the raiders. He and the Kraitt went down, and when they came up again the Kraitt had a silvery crescent blade clenched in its claws. He slashed at Zen with the blade and his own steel-tipped tail, his mouth wide and toothy, breath stinking of heat and blood. But other people had heard the commotion on the platform by then; Zen could hear the hooting alarm calls of frightened Herastec behind him. As the Kraitt feinted again, one of the big squidlike creatures who called themselves the Ones Who Remember the Sea arrived in a whirl of whipping ghost-white tentacles and grabbed the Kraitt by his arms, legs, and tail. Zen stepped past him and went sprinting after the departing train.
“Nova!”
She saw him behind her for a moment — a jolting, upside-down glimpse through the mesh of the metal net. Then she was in midair, tumbling. The Kraitt who had been carrying her had flung her sideways through an open door into the train. Her vision glitched as she landed hard on a rusty deck with Kraitt trampling over her as they piled in behind. The train was gathering speed, leaving the station behind, shooting between high crags and into a tunnel. Dim red light, the stamping of clawed feet, the hot stink of the big lizards.
She sent one last message to Zen. “It’s all right, Zen. I’ll find a way to escape. I’ll be back soon. Don’t—”
Don’t come after me, she had been about to say. But just then the light of a K-gate flared outside the gun-slit windows, time stretched and snapped, and when things righted themselves she was alone with the Kraitt, speeding through an unknown world.
22
Zen kept running long after he knew he could not catch the Kraitt train. He shouted through his headset to the Damask Rose, “They’ve taken Nova! Stop them! Head them off!” But the Kraitt had thrown the whole station into chaos; morvah were maneuvering in every direction and there was no way the Rose could do as he asked.
“It’s all right, Zen,” said Nova’s voice in his headset suddenly. “I’ll find a way to escape. I’ll be back soon. Don’t—” And then a silence that stretched on until he knew that it was permanent.
He turned back. The One Who Remembers the Sea who had helped him was nursing a slashed tentacle and waving the red leather tunic that the Kraitt warrior had left behind when he tore himself free. Others were gathering around to hear what had happened; the paths and sidings were full of bobbing lights. Zen caught the Kraitt tunic as the angry squid threw it aside. It was heavy, perhaps made out of the skin of a Kraitt its owner had defeated. He kept hold of it as if it were a clue and stumbled through the gathering crowd until he met Koth/Atalaí. He started shouting at the
m, “They took Nova! Where does that line go? Where does that K-gate go to?”
The Herastec shied away, staring at him. They didn’t understand how he was still alive. Their own bond was so strong that if they were ever separated they would both die. They knew that it was different for other species, but it still felt wrong to them, as if Zen were a ghost. And perhaps he was, in a way, because, without Nova, he could not talk to them; his headset translated what they said to him, but his mouth could not make the sounds their language needed. Anyway, they were not listening. They had some news of their own to tell him.
“Another bad/surprising thing has happened,” he read, watching the headset translation scroll across his sightline while Koth/Atalaí tossed their heads uneasily and took turns to whinny at him.
“A train came in from Yaarm shortly before the Kraitt attacked you…”
“The Herastec who were on this new train brought us news. They say your gate on Yaarm is gone. There has been a great disaster there. The mountains sat down upon your gate and buried it…”
“What?” Zen couldn’t take it in, this new bad news.
More Herastec were shambling up, some of the ones who had come from Yaarm perhaps, eager to add more details to the story. “Before the mountains sat down another human morvah came through the gate. It carried three humans, but none of them was like this human’s pair-mate…”
Their voices came at Zen like blows. They left him punch-drunk.
“The new humans on Yaarm know of this human Zen. They say he is not an ambassador at all, he is only a thief and a murderer, no better than Kraitt!”
“They say his pair-mate Nova is not a human at all; they say she is some type of (untranslatable) machine!”
Zen heard Koth/Atalaí’s dung hit the floor and smelled its sweetish scent. Making dung was the ultimate expression of surprise if you were a Herastec. “Is this true, Zen/Nova?” they asked. “This cannot be true! We talked to her, she moved, she was not a thing, she was a living being…”