by Andy Remic
He gazed at Anu, eyes filled with tears.
“I will still kill you,” said Anu, with tombstone voice.
“Good! I would not have it any other way. Go to sleep now. I will try nothing, do nothing. Trust me. After all…you took away my claws, you took away my fangs. Don’t you realise? I am like you, Anu. I am neutered. I am an outcast. You turned me into yourself. I can never go back.”
Anu walked down to her cabin, a narrow affair with nothing more than a bunk and brass walls. She locked the door, and realised with horror that Vashell was right. By removing his vachine tools, she had destroyed his rank, his standing, his nobility. She had deformed him from a beautiful vachine. There would be no repair by the Engineers; only terminal condemnation for his very great weakness.
So where would he go? What would he do?
No. Anu had attached Vashell to herself, to her mission, with chains much stronger than love. She had condemned him with a force of exile; an extradition of country, but more importantly, also of race.
The morning was bright and crisp, and snow had fallen lightly during the night, covering the brass barge with a light peppering of white. Vashell uncurled from slumber as Anu crept up the steps, and he stared at her with a bleak smile. Already, his face was healing, skin growing back over his destroyed features; but he would never look the same again. Despite his advanced vachine healing powers, he would be savagely scarred. Anu had, effectively, taken away his handsomeness. Removed his nobility.
Within a few minutes the brass barge was nosing up river, and for the course of the day they came upon more and more tributaries where a decision had to be made on which path to follow. Unfalteringly, Vashell would point, sometimes with a smart comment, other times in brooding silence as his moods swung from savage brutality to almost joyous abandon, as if high on a natural heady cocktail, where he would joke about his ruined features, and mock Anu, saying she was now the only girl for him, and they could breed twisted canker babies together.
As night fell, Anu sat on the deck for a while, huddled in a cloak. Vashell revelled in the cold. Alloria, who had been brooding and silent for the day, returned to her small brass room and huddled under blankets, crying softly to herself. Anu attempted to comfort her, but Alloria had taken to ignoring the young vachine.
“Tell me about Nonterrazake,” said Anu.
“No.”
“Tell me!”
“No!” He laughed. “There are some secrets a man must keep. Some dark truths he must hold to his heart, like spirals of soul; I could tell you, but it would melt your sweet little mind, curl the edges of your heart into blackened wisps of hatred, burn your soul with an eternity hell-fire.”
Anu shrugged. “Will the Harvesters really come?”
“Yes.” Vashell’s tone turned serious. “You should not have done what you did; you have angered the Harvesters beyond reprise. They will never, ever, stop the hunt.”
“Then I will kill them!” Anu snapped, annoyed at Vashell’s negativity.
Vashell shrugged. “When they send five? Ten? A hundred?”
“There are that many?”
“You do not understand what they are,” he said, voice gentle.
“Well, they will have to catch me, first,” snapped Anu, eyes narrowed.
“That shouldn’t be a problem,” said Vashell, scratching at his wounded face and the itching, repairing skin.
“Meaning?”
“You travel to Nonterrazake. For your father. Well, that is their homeland. It is the Harvesters who hold Kradek-ka.”
Anu sat in stunned silence, unable to speak, unable to think. She had assumed they were fleeing the Harvesters. Now, it seemed, to rescue her father she would have to travel into the belly of the beast.
She gazed up at the stars. They twinkled, impossibly distant. And for a long time, Anu felt her soul melt, felt all hope vanish, and realised that her strength had gone.
In despondency, she went below deck for an endless, troubled, twisting sleep.
Anu slept late, and Alloria awoke her.
“He’s gone.”
“What? Who?”
“Vashell. The man whose face you removed with your claws.”
Groggy, and feeling as if she’d been drugged, Anu stumbled on deck and stared hopelessly at the place where Vashell had been tied. His bonds lay, broken on the deck. He was nowhere to be seen.
Anu ran to the barge’s rail. “Vashell!” she shouted. “Vashell!” Her words echoed out across mountain stone, and bounced back wreathed in early morning mist. There came no reply.
“What do we do now?” asked Alloria, softly.
“We continue without him.”
For the morning they travelled, clockwork engine humming, up the ice-filled river. Deep into the maze of the Black Pike Mountains they navigated, were absorbed, and Anu realised that there was no life this far in. No animals, no birds; nothing. It was desolate, barren, as bleak as another world. Even the vegetation was dreary, white and pale green, grey and black. There were few, or no trees, the heady rich evergreens had vanished leagues behind. Only tufted grass remained, mostly ensnared by snow and ice. And yet the mountains…spoke to Anu. Rock-falls boomed. Ice cracked. Rock walls shifted. Boulders fell, crackling with menace to be swallowed by the Silva River. High up, occasionally, out of sight, they heard the terrifying roar of avalanche.
With every sound, the Black Pike Mountains screamed their dominance.
After a short break for a lunch of dried meat from the brass barge’s hold, they continued, until Alloria, who was leaning at the craft’s prow allowing breeze to stream through her hair, gasped.
“What is it?”
“There! That narrow river. To the left. Follow it!”
“What did you see?”
“Just follow it! Maybe I am going insane.”
Anu nudged the brass barge up the narrow river, and they travelled for maybe a quarter of a league; the water grew deep, channelled between two towering four thousand feet walls of sheer black granite, polished and gleaming with ice, and they emerged into…
Into a lush, green clearing.
The water ended in a circular flat pool, and beyond the water’s edge stood a proliferation of trees, plants and flowers. Colours and perfumes raged through the clearing, and Anu brought the barge to a halt, bumping against a natural sloped jetty of rock.
Alloria jumped out onto the jetty, and stood with hands on hips, smiling. The sun was shining, beaming down, warming her face, and she turned back to Anu and laughed. “What is this place?”
Anu climbed from the boat, wary, aware that when on the boat she had some small sanctuary from the Harvesters. She shook her head. “I do not know.”
“Vashell talked of such a place,” said Alloria.
“He did?”
“Yes, he said it led to…the Vrekken? Whatever that is. He said there would be green trees and flowers; and there would be a tunnel. Follow the tunnel, and the foolish traveller would find the Vrekken.”
Anu turned, and her eyes narrowed. In the far wall there indeed was a tunnel opening. It was too perfect, so obviously man-made as opposed to a natural occurrence. This made Anu even more suspicious.
“Did he say anything else?”
“No. Look! Fruit!” Alloria ran to a tree and pulled down an apple. She took a bite, and laughed through juice. “It’s wonderful! Fresh and clean. I can’t believe this little…garden exists amongst the mountains. And can you smell the flowers?”
“I can.”
Alloria tossed Anu an apple, which she caught and bit. Juice ran down her chin, and she felt her mood lighten a little. Alloria was right; this place, with the winter sun shining down between towering walls of rock, was a serious uplift to the soul.
“We cannot stay. We must stock up with supplies. We must continue.”
Alloria sighed, and waded through flowers to look deep into Anu’s eyes. “What are you searching for, Anu?”
“My father. You know this.”
Anu opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. What she wanted more than anything was to be accepted in the Silva Valley; to be accepted as pure vachine. But that had gone, now. Denied her from an early age by the very same father she sought to save; but he’d had his reasons, hadn’t he? For forcing her to become outcast? And, she realised suddenly, what she wanted more than anything was for Kradek-ka, the great inventor, to make her whole again. To put right that which he had twisted. But it was too late for that. Her chance had gone.
“I would seek acceptance,” she said, finally.
Alloria nodded, and gazed off through the trees. Birds sang in the distance. It was an uplifting sound. “Vashell said there was a path, here; a path that leads south, away, out from the embrace of the Black Pike Mountains.”
Anu stared at her. She licked her lips. “You wish to leave?”
“Yes. I would return to my husband. I would return to my children. You understand this, surely?”
Anu sighed. “Yes. I understand you. But it will be a harsh and terrible journey. I believe the paths are…treacherous.”
Alloria nodded. “I would suffer anything to see my family again.”
“Then go. With my blessing.”
“You could come with me,” said Alloria. “I heard what Vashell said; about this place, this Nonterrazake. And the Harvesters who reside there. You don’t even know if your father still lives! It is insanity to go on.”
“You listen well,” said Anu, a little stiffly. “No. I will travel there. If nothing else, I will discover the truth.”
Queen Alloria moved forward, and gazed into Anu’s eyes. “I know I have been…distant.” She licked her lips. “but…thank you, for saving me, from the soldiers. I find it hard to comprehend your ways, but hopefully, one day, if you arrive at my lands in Falanor, I will be able to extend you some form of courtesy; some help.” She paused, awkward, not really sure what she wanted to say, her mind awash with conflicting thoughts.
Anu smiled, leant forward and hugged Alloria.
“It will be as you say.”
Anu stepped back onto the Engineer’s Barge, the scents of rich flowers in her nostrils, in her golden curls, and she nosed the boat away from this inner sanctum, this temporary Eden, and towards the ominous cave which seemed to beckon her with a tiny, sibilant whisper.
Come to me, the cave seemed to say.
Come to the Vrekken.
The brass barge glided across still waters, and entered the darkness of the tunnel.
Within seconds, Anu was swallowed. Was gone.
For hours the brass barge eased through blackness. Occasionally, it would bump against jagged rock walls, and Anukis found herself praying. She did not want to drown. Even worse, she did not want to drown in a tomb-world beneath the Black Pike Mountains!
The wind whistled eerily down tunnels, and it was with a start Anu realised she was in a maze. The tenebrosity obscured the nature of the labyrinth, and it only came with time, with context, as Anu realised she was being drawn along by powerful currents, and no longer the hum of the clockwork engine. For a while she set the engine to full power, heard it clonking, gears stepping, straining against the pull. Then she realised it was futile; whatever pulled the brass barge seemed almost sentient, and she would simply burn out the engine if she continued.
Anu cut the power, and sat in eerie silence made more deafening by the stillness of the barge. She realised, then, she had grown used to the sound of the clockwork engine; it had been a comfort, like mother’s heartbeat in the womb.
Now, only the wind sang her to sleep.
Minutes passed into hours passed into days, and Anu lost all concept of time. She slept when she was tired, and ate what meagre rations remained in the hold of the barge, mainly hard bread, salted fish and a little dried pork. Or at least, animal flesh of some kind.
Eventually, veins of crystal ran through the black rock over Anu’s head; faintly at first, no more than occasional threads, strands of orange and green to break up the monotony of the terminal black. Then the threads grew more proliferous and thicker in banding, and it provided an eerie, underground light of sorts. Anu could make out the backs of her hands, and a vague outline of the barge. That was all.
The noise came after…she did not know. It could have been two days, could have been five. It was a blur, a blur of time, of memory, of identity. The noise began as a tiny crackling sound, which had Anu scampering down to the engine to see if there was a fault. But the clockwork engine was dead; killed by her own pretty, vachine-clawed hands.
Then, after hours, the noise increased and Anu realised it was the sound of gushing water, like that of a waterfall, or fast rapids over rocks. It echoed through the tunnels, strange acoustics summoned and distributed by the very nature of the environment.
More hours passed, and Anu grew increasingly agitated as she realised the source of the increasingly raging noise. It was the Vrekken, a natural whirlpool talked about with reverence in adventurer circles, around camp fires in the middle of the night, by hushed bards in rush-strewn taverns; and by the Blacklippers, who were said to have some unholy alliance with the great whirlpool. Nowhere, however, had Anu ever heard tales that the Vrekken was beneath the Black Pike Mountains—effectively entombed.
She shivered, now, and was drawn along in the darkness.
She realised that forces beyond her controlled her fate.
And she accepted this fate with a great, heartfelt sigh.
It was said her father, Kradek-ka, was down there, in the mythical land of Nonterrazake, down through the Vrekken, down through the mingled salt and fresh waters of the curious rivers which joined and flowed between savage towers of rock. Either that, or a simple death awaited.
The noise grew with every passing minute, and Anu realised the brass barge was moving subtly faster. The noise increased until it was no longer a noise, but a roar, a roar of anger and bestial hatred, a roar to be feared, a roar to instil pure hot terror. Anu grabbed the barge rail, knuckles white, as it began to rock and she wished, for a fleeting moment, that she had stayed with Alloria, travelled the high mountain passes, faced the threat of the hunting Harvesters. But then her jaw muscles tightened, her eyes narrowed, and she conjured a single word.
No.
She would not fear death. She would search out her father. Or she would die in the process.
The roaring grew and grew until it was so loud Anu could have screamed at full pitch and not heard herself. The river was dangerously agitated, rocking the barge from left to right, and slapping it abusively against rock walls.
And then…
A world opened before Anu, at once incredibly beautiful, and awesomely dangerous. It was stunning like a shark up close is stunning, dazzling like black-magick fire, and it held her gaze and she knew, if she survived this ordeal, nothing, ever, would compare to this moment…
The Vrekken was nearly half a league across, and filling a cavern of such incredible scale she never would have believed it could fit inside a mountain. The arena was lit by wrist-thick skeins of mineral deposits in rock walls, swirling, twining bands of orange and green that put Anu in mind of a carnival or festival; only here, there was very little to celebrate. Unless one wanted to celebrate death.
The Vrekken roared, a mammoth circular portal, a frothing juggernaut of churning river water all spiralling down, down, down into huge sweeping circles and further, into a savage cone depth. Anu’s eyes were fixed. Her mouth so dry she could not eject her tongue to moisten lips. The Engineer’s Barge was tugged, then flung into the Vrekken and caught like the tiniest of toys, powering along on surges of current, nose in the air leaving a wide wake through circular waters and Anu spun down, and down, and round and down and she realised the mighty whirlpool consisted of layers and she passed down, through layer after layer of this oceanic macrocosm, of whirling dark energy, of raw power and screaming detonation and mighty primordial compression, and she though
t…
There is no fabled Nonterrazake.
I am going to die, here.
I am going to die.
And the Vrekken roared in terrible appreciation.
FIFTEEN
Endgame
The cankers charged, howling, and the brave soldiers of Falanor marched in armoured squares to meet the attack head on. In ranks, they advanced across the plain, shields locked, a full division of 4800 men arranged in twelve battalions of four hundred, with six in the centre two battalions deep, and three battalion squares to either side of the main square, like horns, the intention being to sweep round and enclose the enemy on three sides.
As the two forces closed, so the soldiers let out war cries and increased their pace, and the cankers accelerated to crash into shields with terrifying force, snarling and biting and clawing, a thousand feral clockwork twisted deviants slamming the battalions with rage…for a moment there was deadlock, then the Falanor soldiers were forced back, their swords hammering out, hacking at heads and claws, at shoulders and bellies, but the cankers were resilient, awesomely tough, incredibly powerful, and their claws raked shields bending steel. With screams of metal, they leapt, fastening on heads and ripping them free of bodies and the armoured shield wall broke within only a few short minutes, panic sweeping through Falanor ranks like rampant wildfire…
Kell crouched beside Nienna, whose face was ashen, watching the carnage below. Terrakon and Lazaluth had rushed away to command their troops, now only Leanoric remained, eyes fixed on the battle, face ashen, nausea pounding him.
“Find a horse,” said Kell, softly, forcing Nienna to tear her gaze from the battle. He took her chin in his hand, made her look at him. “Steal one if you have to. Ride for Saark. You understand?”
“No, I can’t leave you…what will you do?”
“I must help Leanoric.”
“No, Kell! You’ll die!”
He smiled, a grim smile. “I have my Legend to uphold!” he said, and pushed Nienna away. “Now go! You hear me?” She shook her head. “Go!” he roared, and saw Myriam there beside her, and Myriam locked eyes with Kell and a silent exchange, an understanding, passed between them. Myriam placed a hand on Nienna’s shoulder, and nodded. Then they took off through the camp, towards the towering, fractured walls of Old Skulkra, and tethered horses beyond.