by Simon Birks
“Did you say something?” he asked.
“Dead… yet?” she said, and Hoep saw her lips move this time.
Not a figment of my imagination.
“Can you understand me?” he asked. “Can you tell me your name?”
Hoep waited, watching the woman. She didn’t seem to have heard him.
“Can you tell me…” he started to repeat.
“Am I a monster?” she said.
Her voice was stronger now, and Hoep shuddered. It was what she’d been asking when she’d first appeared.
“No,” he said. “You are not.”
“I saw them die. I heard them die. Are we dead yet?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “We are not dead yet.”
He wanted to ask who she’d seen die, but knew it wouldn’t be sensible to remind her of that day. If she came out of this shock, then maybe she would tell them; until then he was more than happy to wait.
“Is there anything I can get you?” Hoep asked.
He didn’t expect an answer, but he noticed the woman’s head tilted the minutest amount at the question, and she seemed to actually be considering it.
“A mirror,” she said.
Sworn to Keep
Hossip heard the voice again. Low, almost not there. It was like the growl of some wild beast. Some intelligent wild beast. He didn’t know what it was saying, not consciously, but something inside him thought perhaps the voice was not talking to the conscious part of him, and that made him worry all the more.
He thought about telling the Ma, maybe when they reached the house. Reaching the house before the Vengeance arrived was the most important thing. Whatever the voice was, it was unknown, but the Vengeance was all too real; a threat they had to deal with.
The horses rumbled on, and the noise of their feet and the wheels of the carriage drowned out everything else. Hossip rocked in his seat. He was excited to return to the house, but felt a degree of guilt, too. After all, he was not returning for anything other than personal reasons.
And, of course, there was the secret he’d been sworn to keep. And the secret was dangerous, and for all he knew, it would be the undoing of them all.
Hossip blinked and opened his eyes wide as if he’d just fallen asleep, but he hadn’t. He’d been aware all the way through. There was something nagging at him, but in an instant it was gone, and the coachman went back to musing.
The Warrior and his Dog
The dog was brown and white. White body, brown head, speckled brown legs. It looked up at Ka Pinto, waiting for something to eat.
“You’re not still hungry?” the man asked.
The dog wagged its tail.
Ka Pinto took some of the food from his plate and put it into the dog’s bowl beside the table. The dog had been a gift. He’d received quite a few gifts since appearing on Ossed. It made him uncomfortable. It made him feel like he owed them.
The warrior Pinto sat in his room, the like of which he could never have imagined back on Whate, feeling lost in every sense of the word.
He listened to the sound of the dog licking the bowl; the food hadn’t lasted thirty seconds. He guessed he liked the dog because he knew what the dog wanted. Company and food. He was easier to understand than anyone he’d met on this planet.
The whole situation was mad.
Ka Pinto stood up from the table and crossed to one of the rough-cut windows. The view beyond was breathtaking. He looked down on an expanse of green, made from the topmost branches of trees that stretched out in every direction, as far as the eye could see. This canopy of green was broken every few miles by the skeletons of enormous beasts jutting up and over even the tallest trees. These bones were both awe-inspiring and frightening. What were these creatures? How had they died? Where were their descendants?
The people who had found him used the skeletons to form the structures of their buildings. They covered them with a patchwork of animal hides, under which a type of baked mud, harder than anything Pinto had ever seen, had been placed. They built the floors out of roughly cut trees, secured onto the bones. Each floor looked ten foot high, and each structure must have had at least seventy floors.
Despite how far up his room was, it managed to be warm most of the time. He had been allowed out every day, accompanied by at least two of the Ossedians acting as guards. He had tried to speak to them, but they didn’t understand him.
Ka Pinto attempted to come to terms with the fact he’d never be on Whate again.
Perhaps that’s all right.
As the colour faded from the day, his old Orb became more prominent in the sky. He had tried explaining his old planet to the guards, through pointing, but it didn’t work. They just look at him blankly.
Now, Pinto stood in his room and watched the Orb he used to be a part as it hung in the sky. He remembered the feel of the sand, his house, his simple way of life. In a way he missed it, but then he’d look at his body, his strength, and at this new world with its unfathomable wonders, and know what he had now was incredible.
The dog rubbed against Pinto’s legs, sensing his master’s restlessness. Pinto reached down and stroked its head.
“If you’re going to eat so much of my food, I’d better give you a name,” he said. Pinto stood thinking for a moment, stroking the dog’s back. “Sogal,” he said, at last. “Yes. Let’s try that.”
The New God
Fijefel waited outside the new God’s door, impatiently. Yes, it was his duty, he was a soldier after all, but this was not fighting. This was being a servant. There was no point in dressing it up. He was at this God’s beck and call.
Perhaps if Fijefel really thought he was a God it would have helped, but he didn’t. It was just some new creature the ground had decided to spit up. A tall, pale-skinned strong creature, who smiled with his face, but was someone else underneath.
Of course, he wasn’t just there to serve the God. He was there to make sure nothing happened to the God, and to make sure the God didn’t do anything bad himself. His commanding officer had been deliberately vague about the amount of force he should use to restrain the God, but Fijefel got the impression that if things started to go wrong… well, a dead deity was better than one that could wield a sword.
Not that Fijefel thought there would be any problems. As far as he could tell, this creature meant no harm. The way he paced the room, only stopping to wistfully look up at the yellow disc, made Fijefel feel sorry for him. He thought the God must be somehow connected with the yellow disc. Some of his kind thought the discs were Gods. Or at least they were the doors to their houses; the Gods who’d once walked the planet with their giant companions, the bones of which they now lived within. The story was, that over the years, the companion beasts turned against their masters, plotted against them, and only at the last minute was their plot discovered. The Gods, enraged, wiped out the beasts in single day, before leaving the surface of this world to live behind the discs in the sky.
Fijefel shifted his weight from one foot to another. Inaction was so tedious. He would definitely ask to move on in a week or so. He couldn’t stand being stationed here much longer.
The guard put his ear to the door. Inside the room, he heard the dog patter on the wooden floor. Fijefel’s people regarded the dogs as their equals. They trusted the animals as the animals trusted them. It was common practice to use the dogs to discern whether new creatures were to be trusted. So far, the dog seemed to like the God.
That was good.
Still, Fijefel would stay on his guard.
Ordinary
Ma Poppun looked out of the carriage window and saw they had left the forest. She noted familiar hills and fields. They were nearly there. Visenai slept by her side, her small frame curled up, her head on the cook’s lap. She felt sorry for the girl. She had something, some kind of second sight. Ma Poppun had heard of such things, but mostly they’d been stories swapped in the small hours, with a drained flask of wine resting beside her chair.
&n
bsp; There was a time when the cook would have felt jealous of someone as special as the girl. Ma Poppun had long thought of herself as just an ordinary person. In her own youth, she’d longed to be an adventurer, a hero who would take on wild beasts and monsters, cut down oversized trees and scale the castle walls to rescue the damsel in distress. Though, of course, why any damsel should be in distress and not just sort her own problems out had been beyond the comprehension of the young Poppun.
But somewhere along the way that had been lost, and she had become a cook. Perhaps cooking food was her gift; she was certainly good at it. She had a natural flair, and cooking always made her happy. Still, she mused, she wasn’t dead yet. There would be plenty more days to fill with new dreams. Ma Poppun stroked young Visenai’s head. Looking after the girl was her primary job now, and that was fine with her. They would have to work hard to keep her special sight a secret. Ma Poppun was sure should knowledge of it get out, Visenai would be labelled a Magic, and people would want to destroy her.
The carriage rattled onward. Ma Poppun smiled as she watched the girl’s face twitch with sleep. She might only be a cook of no particular note, but she was happy. If this was ordinary, she’d take it.
Killers
Gideon had enough food for a week. He had liberated it several days ago from a farmhouse they had passed. That wasn’t why he was out. He was out because he didn’t know how to control the urges he felt to do bad things. They didn’t surface whilst they were walking, whilst they were doing something, but the moment they stopped to rest, the urges returned.
He was ashamed about having them. Confused, too. This wasn’t who he was, and definitely not who he wanted to be. Besides, he needed these people, so he couldn’t hurt them and certainly couldn’t kill them. He tried to meditate. It used to work so well, he used to achieve a little peace at the very least, but now he was unable to shut out the urges; they boiled inside him.
It was getting dark now. He stood about a mile away from the barn where Ka Yeta and Hoep rested. The sky showed no Orbs, the clouds had covered them an hour or so ago. Now, rain was falling. Light at first, but soon a downpour. It was cold rain, too. It pin-pricked his skin, and it felt good.
He was standing by a tree, a dark figure against a dark background, thinking dark thoughts. He had killed the Ka, but he didn’t understand why. He couldn’t fathom what had made him do it. There was no gratification, no great forethought…
And then something almost came to him. A feeling?
A memory.
Something like a memory, but not quite. Gideon saw a flash of white. Then something was there. It was something he hadn’t ever thought about, but it had substance nonetheless. He thought he could get to it. He could feel the edges of it, as if the memory had a mass he could reach out and hold onto.
Let it go.
He was getting soaked now, though the rain was hardly falling. It had turned into a light mist, which came in waves, penetrating his clothes.
Gideon held his breath. There had been a noise within the fog. He wasn’t alone. His thoughts calmed and he waited. The noise came again. A growl. A mad growl. It could have been animal or human. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t care.
Another growl.
“Come on,” Gideon said. “Come on and kill me.”
A pause. It was waiting for something. Gideon smiled. It was waiting for the same thing he’d waited for with the Ka: his back to be turned.
“Not overly different, you and me,” Gideon said.
There was a loud roar. It gave the thing away, although Gideon was already spinning to face it. The shape shot out of the mist. He didn’t have enough time to see details, but he knew if it growled, it had a mouth, and if it had a mouth it was more than likely to have teeth, which would be aimed at his stomach. Gideon swung his arm hard. He didn’t know what he’d get, but there was enough of a mass to hit something.
It connected well. Solidly. The thing was hard, almost unnaturally so. But his blow caught it, and the creature let out a ‘Wumph!’
Gideon knocked it away from him, but felt its teeth snag on his clothes, tearing a piece of his arm. It was like being Resurrected, he thought.
The creature landed on the ground, and Gideon’s hand went to his grazed arm. The injury wasn’t bad. The armour had taken most of the damage. The creature panted, enraged. It was losing control of itself, Gideon thought. It was losing control and becoming weaker.
It came at him again. He heard its feet pounding the mud as it ran. It jumped, he could tell. And then the shape was leaping straight for his head. Gideon anticipated its move. He dropped, quicker than he could ever remember moving in his life. As he did, he raised his arms, and grabbed the creature’s legs, front and back.
Gideon shifted his weight, brought everything to the top half of his body, and used his legs to push forward, slamming the animal to the ground. It hit the earth with such force, all it could do was let out a yelp.
Gideon rolled back onto his feet, arms up ready to defend himself again. He heard nothing. The mist rolled past. Gideon stepped forward again. The creature was not there.
He had the briefest of moments to take this in, before he was struck in the back. Gideon’s breath was punched out of him. His whole body lifted off the ground and was sent flying forward. He felt its claws on his back, pressing against his armour, and he knew there’d only be the smallest amount of time before the creature’s teeth would find his flesh. His body hurt, but his mind was incredibly sharp; sharper than it’d been since the Resurrection. He was a killer, that’s what went through his mind. He was a killer. Not a warrior. He had no understanding of the art of killing, but his reactions were sharp, automatic.
He was aware his right hand had found the sword in his belt and had drawn it. As he fell, Gideon was able to twist his body to give his arm some momentum, and he whipped the weapon around. It was clumsy, but effective. The sword found the side of the creature, and the ripping sound told Gideon he’d dealt a mortal blow. Then his back hit the earth, and his head hit the floor in a whiplash motion. Gideon had a brief second in which to congratulate himself on his own cleverness, before he lost consciousness.
The House
The carriage stopped at the gates of the house. The walls of the property were high; enough to make the gates the best option. Hossip jumped down and inspected the lock. It still held fast.
“No one’s been through this way,” Hossip called back to Ma Poppun. “Which means it’s unlikely anyone’s been in the house at all.”
Hossip watched the carriage door open. Ma Poppun stepped down first, followed by Visenai. The cook let the girl walk ahead, saw her stop.
“I think it’s safe,” the girl said, to no one in particular.
“Me, too,” Hossip said.
Ma Poppun nodded.
“Then let’s go in. See what’s waiting for us.”
*
Hossip guided the horses down the path. At first the house was obscured by a bend in the road and the trees that grew thickly around its edge. As it swung into view, a feeling of dread stole into him. It looked the same, stone upon stone, but there was something else, a sensation that rolled off it in waves and threatened to drown them all in fear.
The horses felt it too. They whinnied and pulled up.
“Be calm, be calm,” Hossip said to them. “We’re close enough.”
Hossip applied the brake and climbed down. He went to the carriage door and knocked on it. Ma Poppun looked out at him.
“The horses won’t go any further,” the coachman said. “If I had a choice, I don’t think I would, either.”
*
Visenai didn’t know when a house turned haunted, but she was pretty sure it had happened to this one over the past week. It was as if it had grown a tall, invisible façade, which leered at them as they approached.
“Sure?” Hossip asked.
He was holding the keys to the main door in his hands, which might or might not have been shaking as he stood,
looking back at them.
“Sure,” Ma Poppun confirmed.
Hossip placed the key in the lock and turned. The tumbler thudded in the mechanism.
The coachman pushed the handle down, opened the door and led the three of them into the darkness.
*
Ma Poppun looked around. There were no surprises to be seen. Everything was how she remembered it. Clean, polished, tidy. She sniffed the air. Nothing. No smell, bar the regular smell of an old, lived-in house. She looked at Hossip, who shrugged at her. Visenai was the first to speak.
“Let’s not split up,” she said.
Ma Poppun laughed, it was exactly what she’d been thinking.
“We need to go to the hall,” the cook said.
“I’m right behind you,” Hossip grumbled.
Ma Poppun beckoned to Visenai and the girl took her hand.
“Prepare yourself,” she said.
The three of them walked as one, in a line. They followed the hallway straight down. It stopped at a set of closed double doors. The cook tried to remember if they’d left them closed the previous week, but couldn’t recall.
Ma Poppun pushed the handle down. With a squeak, it moved, and she pushed the door inward. Without realising, Ma Poppun had narrowed her eyes against whatever scene might lie inside.
“It’s empty,” Visenai said.
The cook opened her eyes fully and stared.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Where have they gone?”
The girl took a few steps into the empty room. The tables and chairs were there, as were the standard place settings, but the people and the feast they’d been eating was gone.
“Someone’s been here,” the Ma said. “Cleaned up.”
“But why?” Hossip asked.
“I don’t think I want to find out.”
Dreams