‘Do you understand it? Do you…’
‘No,’ he cut in on her, flexing and folding his own hand, exercising it back into its older useful form. ‘No I can see nothing about you in it. That’s not a skill I have. Only a female would be able to, but not always then. She could use it, but to really understand it in a way that can talk of it and calculate requires a blood-seer. Few of those.’ His face had a faraway troubled look, or so she would have said if he were human. It was hard to know what it meant for him.
‘We must seem very odd to you,’ she said quietly, still unsure about exactly what had taken place. She had no idea what Karoo might want with knowing her physical makeup – she was not certain if her unique abilities were held in that. Most importantly she did not know if it would be worth enough. Empresses did not pass their powers through a maternal lineage. She didn’t have insight into how she had become one. Instead of surrendering to her worries now when everything was so precarious and she felt desperately uncertain she pursued her curiosity instead. ‘If you hand this over, how will you do that?’
‘However is possible,’ he said. His thoughts seemed far away.
She studied him in his moment of silence. For all his oddity he was compelling and attractive – the oddness only made him more so to her in a way she liked to think was the same as his Karoo curiosity for non-Karoo lifeforms. Technically, now that they had wed, he was hers but she had no illusions about the reality of that. He had been an obediently lifeless automaton through the ceremony, agreeing to what was required and showing understanding but nothing else. She herself, alone in her brief hours of freedom from the Eight, freedom from the city, the duty, felt a piercing loneliness and bereavement she could not articulate. Eth’s hand in hers, jerking with every movement of Hakka’s much wanted, loved intrusion. Their ecstasy, the look on their faces, her grip on his palm. Hand in hand.
She let her hand holding up her blankets drop them. Her nightgown was so sheer it may as well have been a fading illusion. She was tiny in the huge, empty bed and knew herself more adequate than beautiful. Her eyes were so large, so fixated, they seem to hold her whole soul in them. ‘Please can you?’ She didn’t even know if he would comprehend it, but reading the real intent in people was something he never faltered at. She didn’t need the words, not any of them, even though there was a floodtide the size of an ocean of all she wanted to say.
His reply was a slow blink and a dip of his chin, yes. The orange eyes reappeared, appraising her, and he began to slowly unbutton the front of his shirt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BORZE
Borze disliked portal travel almost as much as he disliked the sense of cogs turning behind the scenes where he was not allowed to go. But plotting and Imperial machinations were at least known quantities in their way. The portal was a thin sheet of nothing suspended between a delicate framework of wires held and protected within a massive stone and lead shield and he knew nothing about those things. He didn’t mind trusting engineers or other mages most of the time, but this felt much worse than guns and bombs and illusion machines. This was a warp effect on matter, on him, and he had no protection from whatever it did but he had no choice but to use it to pay his visit in person to the dig and return in time to attend the ball.
His horse, picking up his discomfort, pranced and champed. Behind him he felt the nervy shifting of men and animals who liked it less still and he kept his seat, pressing forward at the operator’s beckon and hearing the thudthump of hooves going up the wooden ramp, rustling in the remains of straw kicked so many times it was grey and filthy. Through the veil he saw a mirage of a place that he knew only through scouts; men who had run themselves thin rushing to Glimshard across dangerous lands, alone. A year of that, and men lost and men dying and imprisoned, men sent south on a long journey that was better than its destination though they faced warring bands, thieves, ferocious Steppelords bent on snarling their power to the Empire. So few returning and those that did silent or mad. Glimshard’s shame and his personal failing, he felt. Crossing this veil shimmer, crossing the river of his fear and responsibility – these were deserved trials by now, but he must hold his mind still and calm whatever he found there. Shrazade said there was fate waiting for him there, and she being not a seer but a dealer of fact, he knew it would be in the form of men, their voices, their doings.
His horse reared suddenly, trying to wheel to the side and turn from the strange watery shiver in the world that he urged it to go through. He sat it and let it have its moment, turning around to see the remains of the world behind him, looking down as he did so to the solid muscle and shoulder of his white mount, seeing suddenly in its place the shift and slide of the girl’s limbs under his in the steam of the bath house. Gau Tam’s voice sounded in his ears but he didn’t hear what it said. He put his hand on the horse’s shoulder, damp with sweat, and let his hand on the rein be loose so that it seemed he set it free. With this it calmed and stepped on, one hoof, another, the boards and the sandbags of the ramp noisy but solid and clearly present on the other side. Borze felt his heart lurch – a girl, a horse, moving into worlds that frightened them.
They passed through. There was a moment of silence and peace, no sensation, then a slow caress of humid air, the clank of a different ramp and the flap of flags and tent sides, desultory as they greeted him. Heat was like an everywhere coat, inescapable, claustrophobic after the clear plains breeze and the stallion shook its head and snorted, pawed the wood and voiced a loud call of displeasure.
Of the men there to meet him he recognises faces sent months ago, leaner and darker with battle hardness.
‘Quieter if you please,’ were the first words from the garrison commander, Barsan, his salute the greeting. ‘Undue noises upset the forest.’
He wasn’t mounted, none of them were. They were a cavalry unit once. Borze didn’t ask, he knew it would be clear soon enough why. Behind him, Gau Tam began the complaint he held back – no horse, where is the ceremony, the regiment, the proper greeting? Borze ignored it all, rode down the ramp and dismounted as soon as he was able, handing the reins of the snorting, discomforted stallion to the nearest competent-looking soldier and removing his helm.
The sound was a sudden shock. He knew it of old but was not prepared for it. That background hum and whine and grate of insects, billions of them and none readily seen. The helm’s leather pads had blocked it or blurred it with the rush of his own blood beating. Together with the heat it lent everything a sweltering, occupied feel as if there was no space here for new creatures, not an inch. All was claimed and consumed already.
Borze signalled for Barsan to attend him, leaving the cohort he had come with – poor offering to this garrison – under Gau Tam’s charge. As the general and his commander here drew to the end of the tented shielding around the portal he spoke quietly.
‘How goes it, Barsan? The truth, not some crap you’ll tell Alide or the Ministries or the Empress.’
‘I think you should see for yourself,’ the commander said. If he reproached Borze for not coming in person sooner he didn’t say it but Borze suspected it in the tightness of his voice.
The tenting opened on to a muddy track through sparse forest. The ground was livid green with moss and grasses, trees of kinds Borze had seen rarely, tall and draped with grey lichens and evergreen vines. Among this, the main camp was built up and fortified with spiked logs driven into the wet ground, pointing outwards. Gaps were filled with thorn branches. The portal station was at the centre, guards patrolling around it as well as at the periphery. The red of the science tents, traditional, had been muddied and rained out to a flat brown. The green army shelters were pale khaki. A strong and relentless sun beat through thin clouds that were building up in the mid-morning, promising downpours by afternoon.
Barsan showed him around the officers’ tent, the mess hall, the barracks and the hospital tent, which was full to capacity and overflowing into a lean-to. Borze walked on rushes between the low c
ots holding men and women whose bodies were often unmarked. Their faces said shock to him, some inward and haunted, some quivering with repressed flight. Many were tied to their beds. They all breathed as if they dare not breathe, like children in the middle of the night in the dark, listening for monsters. The most unnerving thing about them was their silence. Once they were beyond earshot and outside again he noted it and Barsan said, ‘They daren’t make a sound. It’s always some sound or other that triggers the attacks.’
‘Why haven’t you sent them back yet?’ Borze disliked the notion of them being there, reminding the others, dropping morale.
‘Alide refused to use the portal for them. Said it was a waste of energy and they would have to wait until the camp was closed.’ Barsan paused. They had reached a gateway where several guards were standing, fully armed. He signalled for it to open, muttering, ‘Dig’s this way.’ The track led on. They walked to the edges where the mud was less deep, slowly moving into denser forest until branches crowded overhead and blocked almost half the sky. On the way, Barsan’s voice was quiet and Borze saw him watching every shadow.
‘Alide doesn’t want them back in Glimshard where people will start asking questions,’ he murmured as he trod with catlike quiet over tussocks, Borze following his tracks as they moved over thick, half-crushed vegetation in near silence. ‘He’s paid the medics extra to keep them here and say nothing. He said his orders were from the Empress. Nothing must interfere with the recovery.’
The stench, Borze thought: mud and sappy greenness, odd plant scents and a thick fuggy ground humidity mingled with rot and a hint of putrefying flesh – the stench was like a living thing in its own right. He felt clogged with it already, contaminated, as he finally saw a glade ahead, and within it some kind of pit. Barsan led the way, agile and lightfooted through the mire, Borze trying to copy his practised gait over the awkward land.
There were soldiers aplenty here, pale under their visors, sweat running down and making their light jungle clothing cling to them. Flies buzzed everywhere in the light and larger insects, dazzlingly coloured, zoomed and droned just above head height, crossing and recrossing the opened pit and its broad, muddy border. Borze found himself watching them in blunt fascination, a kind of horror in their sheer size and audacity but a delicate wonder in their precise construction. Barsan ignored them, batting at a dragonfly that came too close to him with weary habit.
‘I don’t like it when they land on me,’ he said. ‘I feel like someone’s watching.’
Borze said nothing but the thought had already occurred to him. His attention was sucked away however by the other features of the dig. ‘Do you need so many men on duty?’
Barsan nodded. He spoke just loud enough to be heard over the saw and hum of the insects and the occasional whine and grind of machinery in the pit. ‘Experience dictates it. We can go for many days and no trouble. Then without a sign – they’re everywhere.’ The man swallowed and shuddered, unable to contain his revulsion. He swiped his forehead with one wrist covered in a thick swatch of cloth to mop the sweat and Borze took note of that too. His own cropped hair was already trickling with moisture under his helm.
Barsan gave him the tour – the various tents, the huts, the fortifications, the drill for attack, the all-clear signal, the hours of operation. Borze’s confidence in him grew as they progressed. Barsan was a tough vet and he had it in hand here, as much as that could be a description of a single, desperate outpost in a hostile land under constant pressure of siege. What startled him most was how small it was. He had sent troops here and got bodies back, or what was left of them. He had sent so many troops. The Empress had lost twenty-four scientists, engineers and magi.
Barsan took him down to the pit, following a broad path built up and reinforced with felled timber in long steps that ringed the sides. Wood chips and sawdust had been ground into the thick, dark mud and lower down in the heavy dark red clay that held the precious artefact in its sucking grip. Borze realised then why the fuss was so great. The thing was huge, a dark blue and shining cone of metal that stuck out of the ground at a vaguely obscene angle; blowfly iridescent but with a soulless, manufactured authority that could not be denied even as the earth attempted to swallow it whole. Everything about it was unnatural and out of place. Scarring and blast marks covered its surface and it was obvious that some of the scoring was where things that had projected from it had been ripped off. The mud stepped ramp that led around it stopped about fifty metres down at a hole in the side which was so symmetrical and well formed he could see that it was a hatch. A dim glow and cables leading to a crystal-operated generator rack showed where the expedition had gone inside. He felt as all those without any useful gift felt at witnessing the mighty feats of others’ talents: humbled, fearful and resentful.
‘It’s big,’ he said, for want of something else to say, forced to state the obvious and to understand the Empress’ determination and the scientists’ passion, the engineers’ obsession. Artefacts like this usually came in much smaller sizes, from tiny fragments you could gather in your palm to oddities on exhibit at the Museum – things the size of carts at their largest. Things on a scale that he did not feel intimidated by. He was caught short by Barsan’s bleak grin.
‘This is just the tip,’ Barsan said, transferring his gaze to the buried machine with visceral repulsion. ‘Inside it’s huge.’
‘Like a house?’ Borze said, hoping.
‘Like a city,’ Barsan said, killing his hopes with a kind of grim pleasure. ‘Don’t think even this phase of the expedition has got to the end of it yet.’
Borze stared at the cone. It was large but it wasn’t a city. He realised why nobody was trying to unearth it now, why it could not be simply extracted. The sun was high, it burned him where it fell on his skin through the leaf shadows or seemed to, the shade icy in comparison. Colours seemed vivid. He smelled an unmistakable thick, animal musk and then something hit his face, hard and sharp at the same time. He blinked and saw that Barsan had slapped him. The sound of feet running through sucking mud struck his ears with incredible clarity and he saw, in slowed motion, the shapes of soldiers in jungle fatigues go rushing, leaping past him like bulky deer, bows and spears in hand. They wore scarves over their mouths and noses. Someone was tying something around his face too, and it smelled astonishing, the fibres, cotton, hot and dry, a damped splurge on it cutting through the scent of the sun with violent cold streaks of acrid mineral that made his sinuses flare icy hot. Mint and eucalyptus, he knew these, but not the buried power of magespelled camphor that sliced through to his brain directly and finally allowed him to move at a normal speed, his body restored to its rightful place at the centre of this miraculous wonderland of the senses.
‘We’re under attack!’ Barsan was dragging at his arm, propelling him forcefully back along the trail and stumbling up over the wooden earth supports. ‘We have to get to the shelter…’
Borze recalled the briefing. He hadn’t questioned it then but he’d wondered at the cowardice of hiding in holes and behind so many barricades, not because he didn’t understand the value of that in its place but the Empire had sent such massive forces, why didn’t they have better than this by now? He ran with Barsan, following the more experienced man only because he had kept so fit and able as a matter of pride, otherwise he would have been left for dead and the way that everyone was fleeing to their assigned positions he wasn’t at all sure anyone would have stopped to help him. The running forced more of the strange odour up his nose, and more of the camphor’s counterspell. He had his will and control back from that initial intoxicating paralysis but everything still moved as though time was stalling. They ran over the same ground twice, he could have sworn, before he saw Barsan’s lithe body slide down through a barely visible hole in the ground, grass blades bending and parting before him as if he was swallowed into a strangely reversed earthen womb. Then he was following and falling, scrabbling, running again through a wood-walled tunnel half his he
ight. Mage lights glimmered in the planking alongside trickling water. More dripped on his head as he scraped his back and his legs screamed at the pain of the crouching run.
They came into a torchlit cave, already full with the four men who’d reached it before them, eyes wide and wild above their green scarves, bodies hunched and shaking, sweating, the air filled with the stink of camphor so badly he moved to rip his scarf off and once again found Barsan’s calloused hand saving him from himself. The man had a grip like iron. ‘Keep it on, General, whatever you do.’ Behind him one of the soldiers had brushed past to close the opening with a close fitted wooden door. It was so heavily carved with runemagics there was barely a strip of bare grain left. Iron bars battened it into place.
As his eyes acclimatised to the dimmer conditions Borze saw the stutter-gleam of a glowslate coming to life. It was propped on a shelf which was otherwise stacked high above and below with emergency crystal power packs, water canisters and dried food ration. A throaty, soft hum and the sudden wash of moving air across his sweating face told of air recyclers coming on, or at least one. The soldier running it, fresh scars pink on his face, looked up from its readout. ‘Got an hour or two.’ His voice was apologetic and died quickly in the tiny space. ‘Filter’s only meant for three people.’
Borze did a quick head tally: six. Bodies moved aside to let him and Barsan to the front for the best view of the slate. The way these men moved made a new kind of cold trail its fingers up Borze’s spine. It had been a long time since he’d been in a battle, longer still since a war, but their silent ease, each to their position, effortlessly shifting roles and accepting hierarchies without hesitation, that meant they’d fused into the kind of unit that only manifested under conditions of continuous, extreme threat. There was no room for ego, or even a need for names. Some were mercs and others Glimshard men but their faces all had the same intent, near-animal stare. There was survival, or death, and nothing else.
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