by D. P. Prior
“Caw,” screeched the kryeh, a little louder this time. It opened its razor-lined jaw to squawk again and then clamped it shut. The light had vanished.
Mephesch shrugged.
Gandaw became aware that he was gritting his teeth and he once more felt the calming fluids entering his body. He glared at the screen.
“Where does that road lead?” His voice sounded cold and indifferent, just the way he liked it.
Mephesch punched keys on a console and threw a look over his shoulder. “The city of Sarum.”
Gandaw retracted his microfilaments and threw up a map on his vambrace, the terrain etched in sharp green lines, the data overlaid in red.
Sarum was the largest city in the Midwest, and virtually on top of the last place to register a reading: the village of Oakendale. He’d sent mawgs to investigate that one, but before they’d located the source, they’d been driven back by some religious maniac wielding a sword. After that, he’d lost all trace of the emission.
“This is a different piece,” Mephesch said, running some calculations on the keypad.
Two pieces in such close proximity? Someone was being careless. Either that, or the savage, Huntsman, was growing weaker. In any case, this was too good an opportunity to miss. With two pieces of the Statue of Eingana, Gandaw might be able to use them to locate the others. He glanced at Mephesch, but the homunculus was oblivious, still tapping out numbers. An indicator winked on Gandaw’s vambrace. His heart rate was ever-so-slightly elevated, but not for long.
“Get me Krylyrd,” he said in a voice of utmost calm.
Mephesch hit some more keys and the images on all the screens merged into one enormous picture of a rough amphitheater hewn from dried mud.
The mawg stepped into view, hunched and tuberous, part wolf, part reptile, a string of skulls adorning its sinewy neck. Krylryd’s image loomed from the walls, yellow eyes feverous, black lips curling away from the rows upon rows of needle-sharp teeth lining its jutting maw and extending all the way to its gullet. If Gandaw recollected correctly, that was the result of throwing in the genes of some carnivorous plant or other. The mawgs had also been imbued with a semblance of the collective intelligence he’d observed in ants. He’d never have created such a mixed bag these days, but back then he was still learning, and besides, the mawgs had proven a valuable tool. With the disappearance of the last planeship, they were his sole presence on Earth—his hands and feet, you might say, complementing the eyes and ears he had orbiting the planet.
“Krylyrd.” He loathed addressing the gibbering creature.
The mawg threw itself on the ground and started contorting and foaming at the mouth, obviously convinced it was entering some mystical state from which to commune with a god. Either that or it was just putting on a show for the rest of the hive, ensuring they were awestruck enough to accept its leadership rather than devouring its flesh and then, as was their custom, disgorging it.
“Someone has used the power of Eingana. Send scouts to the city of Sarum in Sahul. Tell them, if they find the statue they will be infinitely rewarded.”
Actually, he’d un-create them along with the rest of the imperfect universe, but Krylyrd didn’t need to know that.
The mawg’s jaws parted in an exultant roar, and in the background, Gandaw could hear the howls of the hive growing to a frenzy in the anticipation of blood.
THE ORPHAN
One of the knights heard something and held back. The others pressed on, a staggered line sweeping through the trees with the subtlety of stampeding cattle. Huntsman scuttled along the branch and lowered himself by a silken thread. He hung above the knight’s sandy hair, watched him turn in response to a sniffle from the undergrowth. Huntsman swung back and forth then sprang as the knight set off towards the sound. He landed lightly on the back of a white tunic that covered silver mail. The knight ducked under branches, crashed through ferns with no recognition that he had a passenger.
The boy, Sammy, scampered out of a thicket, mud-stained and miserable, squealing like a spitted pig. The knight lunged at him, caught hold of his shirt and ripped it away, sending Sammy sprawling on his face.
“Stay away, stay away!” the boy cried, crawling on hands and knees.
“Sammy, it’s me, Barek.” The knight held up his hands and inched forward.
Huntsman dropped to the forest floor, spindly legs retracting, flesh boiling, twisting, growing until he stood as a man behind the knight. Barek’s hand went to his sword and he turned, gaping like a pituri chewer. Huntsman curled his lips back to show the stubs of his teeth, rolled his eyes up into their lids, and hooked his fingers like the fangs of a death adder.
“Barek!” Huntsman sprayed him with spittle. The knight staggered back with his arm across his face, but Huntsman advanced, sticking out his jaw, hissing, and flicking his tongue. “I have your name, white fellah.” He clenched his fists and ground them together.
Barek tripped and fell on top of the boy. He rolled away and backed towards the nearest trunk. “I’m not going to harm him!” His body shuddered and froth spilled from his mouth.
“First your name, then your breath; last your heart.” Huntsman started to pull his fists apart, stretching Eingana’s invisible sinew, tauter, tauter, tauter…
“Please!” Barek shrieked. “I’ve done nothing. Do it to Gaston!”
Sammy looked from Huntsman to the knight, head shaking, tears cutting trails through the dirt on his face. The boy frowned at Barek, winced and tapped his temples as if he couldn’t understand something. In that instant, Huntsman’s focus shifted and the knight fled through the trees.
“Mommy!” Sammy wailed. “Mommy!”
Huntsman stepped towards him, but the boy screamed.
“Shh! Bad men will hear you.”
Sammy screamed even louder, eyes and nose streaming, limbs shaking. Huntsman scooped out some maban dust from his medicine bag and blew it in the child’s face. Sammy gasped, inhaled the powdered crystal, stiffened, and dropped like a stone. Huntsman lifted the boy to his shoulders, scented the air, and slipped into the undergrowth, which parted before him and sprung back when he passed.
He carried the child beyond the forest and deep into the bush along trails that would have been invisible to any but a Dreamer. The knights wouldn’t follow him into the open where there was no shade from the blazing torch of Walu the Sun-Woman. He set the boy down on the ochre earth, covering him with the cloak of feathers. Huntsman balanced on one leg like a brolga and stilled his breathing until he could feel the heartbeat of Sahul. It throbbed beneath his sole, pulsed through his veins, pounded in his head and brought him emptiness. Slowly, the web began to spread out from his calm center, strands of ghostly light creeping to the horizon, sensing, feeling, vibrating. The questing threads recoiled from the north where they touched the dead earth around Sarum. That was nothing unusual, but as he sent them on into the city, Huntsman felt the web sicken like a fish in stagnant water. Breaking the link with Sahul, he let the strands fade and sat upon the earth. There was badness at the heart of Sarum, a poisoning of the breath of Eingana. Her power seeped into the city, but it was not pure. Something warped it, turned it against its nature.
Sammy groaned and pushed the cloak away. A bull-ant danced upon the back of his hand. The boy sat up to peer closely at it, muttering and cocking his head. Huntsman pressed a finger to his lips and wondered. He’d intended to take the child to Rhiannon to atone in part for what he’d put her through. All for the greater good, Aristodeus had said, but Huntsman was no longer sure the philosopher had Sahul’s best interests at heart. He was a pale-skin, after all, and that seldom boded well for the land. He’d said a battle was coming, the end of the Dreaming. Huntsman shook his head. Aristodeus said it had happened before; said he’d been there. Last time he’d failed in some way and all was nearly lost; but this time he was prepared. Huntsman had believed him and gone to Rhiannon, told her to reject Deacon Shader and free him for the destiny Aristodeus had planned.
“What does it tell you?” He crouched over the boy.
“Monsters underground.” The boy smacked his lips and pointed to the north. “Heading for the city.”
“What kind of monsters?”
Sammy jumped up and blew the ant away. He thrust his hips back and stooped, letting his arms dangle, knuckles scraping the ground. Baring his teeth, he opened his mouth wide in a snarl.
“Mawgs are coming?”
The boy nodded, a look of remembered horror passing across his face.
“Statue must be drawing them,” Huntsman thought aloud. “Some fool has been using it.”
Sammy’s eyes filled with tears and he began to shake. “Mommy? Daddy?”
Huntsman raised his hand to strike him; drew it back down. Sahul had spoken to the child, he was certain of it, but now grief had claimed him once more. Patience of the crocodile—that is what was needed now. Let the boy grieve. Sahul had marked him. She would not let him go.
“Come, Sammy.” Huntsman’s mind was made up and he turned his face to the north. “We will go to Sarum and help Eingana.” And maybe find Rhiannon; return her little brother. If that’s what Sahul wanted.
Sammy didn’t complain about the heat or the endless trudging through the red dust. The desert was occasionally broken by a tuft of spiky weed or a skeletal gum tree. The tears had dried as quickly as they had come. Huntsman knew the child had retreated into the Dreaming, where the horror of his losses would not be felt.
He glanced at the boy, noting the empty stare, the silent determination that would see him walk with no particular destination until the heat and the miles finally claimed him. He recognized the symptoms, for they were common among his people, who would wander the bush in pursuit of answers, wisdom, or death. He had undertaken such a journey himself before the Wapar Man had finally caught up with him and taken him to the Homestead.
The midday sun was scorching, and even Huntsman’s enchantments could not keep them from its life-sapping heat. Scanning the hazy horizon, Huntsman spotted a lone and leafless tree in the distance.
The Sun-Woman’s torch harried them until he settled his ward beneath its skeletal limbs, his feathered cloak draped from the branches for shade.
“Why did they kill Mommy and Daddy?” Sammy asked, stretching out beneath the shelter.
Huntsman had asked himself similar questions since the slaughter of his people before the Reckoning.
“Hearts of people have two seeds,” he explained, picking up two small stones and holding them before the boy. “First is bright with life. If it grows, it overflows with light and love so that they take root in others. This is way of things, to join together. Two beasts become one…” Huntsman tailed off and cleared his throat. “Second seed is not from Sahul.”
Sammy looked at him blankly.
Huntsman thought for a moment. He was not used to children. He tried again.
“Everyone has a seed of good and a seed of evil. Life is a fight between these seeds. If evil seed grows stronger than good, people do bad things, things that hurt others.”
“So it was the seeds that killed Mommy and Daddy, not the men?”
“No,” Huntsman said carefully. “Seeds open different paths. It is task of folk to choose between paths, between Sahul and Deceiver.”
“Deceiver?”
“Father of Lies, white folk call him. Demiurgos. He is brother of Eingana, frozen in ice at heart of Abyss.”
Sammy’s forehead wrinkled up like an old man’s. “I know about him. Soror Agna—my sister’s friend—she told me. So good seeds come from Sahul and bad ones come from the Demi … Demiur … Abyss?”
Huntsman laughed. “Barraiya People see signs everywhere.” He swept his arm out to encompass all the land they could see. “Signs from Sahul, like ants talking to children.” Sammy’s face lit up at that. “And evil signs, like Kutji spirits. It is why we have Kadjis to guide us, help us to make right choices.”
“How?”
It was a good question. Huntsman bit his thumb nail off, spat it to the red dust. “With some things choices can be difficult.” He spoke now almost to himself. “Strands of good and evil grow twisted like vines and creepers. Become knotted; each choice has its own dangers.”
Sammy looked even more perplexed.
“Some choices,” Huntsman continued, “are easy. Anything that brings harm cannot come from good seed. By hurting your mother and father, men chose bad path.”
Sammy nodded his understanding. “But what if a person hurts another to stop them doing bad things to someone else?”
Huntsman ruffled the boy’s hair. “Then you must follow voice of your heart, wise little fellah, for there paths have become so tangled it is hard for mind to unravel.”
“So Gaston, Justin and Elgin weren’t really our friends? They are bad? All those knights are evil?”
“What they do makes them so.”
“Can they become good again?”
Huntsman did not answer and looked away into the sprawling red desert. His thoughts were troubled by the statue and whatever was warping its power, sending waves of sickness through the web around Sarum.
Can evil become good? He stroked the boy’s hair, smiling as Sammy closed his eyes, his breathing deepening. Can a poisoned stream regain its purity? Can a thing once changed become what it was before?
He settled down beside the boy, spirit drifting in the timelessness of the Dreaming. He saw himself atop the Homestead plunging the blade into his chest; felt once more the fire of the statue burning away his flesh, re-forming him as something both more and less than human. What did he care for good and evil, for life and death? All these things had ceased to concern him since the moment of the Reckoning. He was one with the Dreaming, bound to Sahul in the spirit. If the land lived, nothing else mattered. Nothing except the statue, for it contained the power of Eingana, mother of the Dreaming. In Huntsman’s hands it had destroyed the power of the Ancients and their Technocrat; but before that, long before the birth of the boy named Adoni, the Technocrat had found a way to enslave Eingana in the Dreaming and turn her power to his own ends. What if the mawgs finally found a piece? What if they returned it to their master? Was this the coming battle that Aristodeus had foretold? After all, he had spoken of Sektis Gandaw and the unweaving of creation.
THE MAZE
Shadrak stretched to loosen his muscles, dug his fists into his back until it popped. Even the smell of other people’s shit could be relaxing, if it’s what you were used to. He set off through brick tunnels that were oozing with sludge, covering his face against the stench with his cloak. He guessed that’s what they meant by familiarity breeding contempt. Might feel like home, but it stank worse than a cat’s arse.
Reaching one of the marks he’d carved into the concrete floor, he dropped to his hands and knees and felt around. A small rectangle of concrete shimmered and dissolved, revealing a metal panel studded with buttons. He pressed a combination of numbers and stood back as a circle opened in the floor, silver gleaming down below. Dropping through the hole, he landed with a clang on the burnished metal floor. Couldn’t have been anywhere better. Here he could skulk unnoticed. Here he was unseen, far beneath Sarum’s foundations.
Sinuous steel corridors wound away in each direction, leading to oval chambers via doors that slid open at the touch of a button. Some rooms contained cages of various sizes, many holding the skeletal remains of animals, and some of humans. Shadrak had also found chambers in which chairs like hollowed-out eggs rose from the floor around plinths of lights and mirrors; and some in which pallets of a malleable substance slid from walls, illuminated by soft violet light from an invisible source. He’d also located numerous stores of sealed foodstuffs and a bunch of strange armaments. There were other doors that refused to open, stubbornly resisting all the tools of the trade.
&nb
sp; He’d first discovered the Maze as a child—literally fell into it as he fled from a pair of corpse-sucking ghouls. He’d been searching through the bins behind the Green Man and disturbed their meal—some tart fool enough to work the backstreets at night. P’raps, like Shadrak, she hadn’t had much choice. Food was hard to come by back then, ’specially with Kadee rotting away in bed and Shadrak too young and too freakish to work. One of the hatches leading down from the sewers had been left open. Took him days to figure out the codes to get back out again.
Kadee had been his only redeeming quality: his foster-mother, his opposite in so many ways, not least of all the blackness of her skin compared with his own deathly white; the only person not afraid of him, not repelled by his deformity. She’d seen his dwarfism as a gift, his pink eyes as a blessing from the gods of the Dreaming. What would she have said about the murdering, the torture? Shadrak bit the end from his fingernail and spat it on the floor. Didn’t matter what she thought anymore, not now she’d gone back to the ground with her precious ancestors.
Cold blue lights sprang to life, sharply illuminating another metallic corridor with numerous tributaries. Each had an arched lintel engraved with an identifying numeral. He made a quick calculation and checked it against his mental map. He may have been a devil-eyed midget, but at least he’d been blessed with a perfect memory, and that was the key to his success. Not only did it furnish him with all the twists and turns of the Maze, the openings to the city above, which he could creep from unseen and scurry back into like a rat, but it also ensured he never forgot a face.
Shadrak stiffened as he heard movement up ahead, a barely audible footfall and the merest rustle. Something made a hushing noise. More than one, then. The light from the blue ovals on the ceiling meant there were no shadows to hide in, so he loosened his cloak and reached for the blades in his baldric.