Borze turned his face back to the slate and saw a clear image of the digsite, abandoned. The cone’s hatch was shut, unplugged cable lines tangled outside it. Nothing moved there. Barsan’s hand glided across the control panel and the image followed his gesture and turned to show the track. Someone stood on it, quite still. Behind him Borze felt the soldiers’ tension peak, breath stalling as the image moved in. Borze understood this slate magic even less than the other forms. A spirit brought the visions, he’d been told, by a woman who had looked deeply apologetic for the storybook explanation but all the words of her specifics had failed to make any impression in his mind.
Now the view flew unerringly towards the figure in Glimshard fatigues, rooted to the knee in the rich mud. He was a tall, strong man, his long greyed hair bound up into tight braids that hung down his back in greasy lines.
‘It’s Ghoriat,’ said one of the men, his voice a mix of fear and prurience that Borze couldn’t fathom.
‘Shut up,’ Barsan ordered. The slate shifted. It was a man in a forest, calm, waiting. Then he opened his mouth as the view spun sideways and revealed his ordinary, sweat-covered face, bearded and filthy. A strange hooting sound came out of his mouth, relayed by the same means as the image in faultless reproduction. It wasn’t something Borze thought could come out of a human throat and at the same instant he thought that Barsan said, ‘He’s gone over.’
‘What’s going on?’ Borze demanded, hearing his voice fill the air like a storm of grit, coughing after, the camphor making his eyes water.
‘He’s calling them,’ Barsan said and then glanced at his commander’s face and made an equivocal gesture with his shoulders as the man in the slate looked expectantly into the trees. ‘You might have noticed a slight discrepancy in the number of people who returned to the city and the number you sent out and what you see here.’
Borze held his gaze over the reeking fumes coming from the scarf. He nodded, even though in that moment he was admitting to a junior oficer that he had been kept misinformed, that someone here was in charge and it wasn’t him. Barsan nodded, absorbing the fact too, and his gaze became canny. His eyes moved, looking over the men behind but they flicked fast to Borze again, revealing that all of them were simply focused on the slate, and if they had understood it wasn’t stirring them.
‘They were reported MIA,’ Borze lied, giving Barsan permission to continue.
‘They are, in a way,’ Barsan said, turning back to the slate’s vision. ‘But they’re not coming back.’
The man who was not Ghoriat hooted again, softly, a greeting sound, and then Borze saw something his mind couldn’t reconcile with any reality he knew. Parts of the forest dissolved and reformed into figures, huge and strange, each different but bearing vague resemblances to creatures he knew. In the first moment they were plant, in the second they were animal, insect, bird. Most of them had humanoid characteristics that immediately recalled Tzaban to his mind although the tiger man was much more human than anything that came stalking, prowling, flying to meet the soldier on the path. And smaller. And less likely to make him scream with the sheer impossibility of their existence and the way they had been, a few moments before, nothing but plants growing in a jungle as they should. Now they stalked around Ghoriat and made soft noises in return. He smiled and reached up his hands to them as though they were gigantic pets that he was going to caress. Tentacles and clawed limbs draped around him, touching him in turn as if he was their beloved. His old, lined face, grizzle-bearded, was filled with awe and wonder as he looked into their beaked, fanged faces, their eyes: two, four, eight, a thousand, filled with crystalline light.
They tore him to pieces, throwing him up in a celebrant’s joyous exaltation so that his limbs revolved in different directions, bloody guts and muscle painting red against the brilliant greens of the world, the azure cruelty of the sky. They opened their mouths and embraced his return. They sang a song of strange notes, sad and kind, and though Borze didn’t see them eat, didn’t see what happened exactly, when they parted they were changed and become more like men, grizzle-bearded and dream-eyed, their voices shaping words like those he knew, as if said in foreign ways, half lost by intoxication – ‘Stillen koming… all forth… eaten’s not deaden… Ghoriatte, Ghoriauten… where diggen… no more. Bad badden. All buried earth etten it. Et it. We culd notta et it but dis eaters etten ’im. Says nay, nay.’
Coming from mouths not made to speak it was a travesty, but Borze listened for his life to it as red ran down beak and fang, was trampled in the mud as they turned to each other, then fell to silent all fours, as dogs, as cats, nothing he knew. They divided like water and ran in both directions, to the portal camp and to the digsite where he, Borze, huddled in his earth hole and watched them come.
‘They’re getting more coherent,’ Barsan said as the soldiers swore. ‘We’ve learned that they take prisoners and use them this way, and other ways. But this is for talking. They have learned to speak, after a fashion. It doesn’t always last long for some reason.’
‘They knew his name,’ Borze said, feeling somehow this was important.
‘Yeah, they know everything when they eat you,’ Barsan replied bitterly. ‘Access codes, passwords, work rotas… Nice way to spy huh?’
Behind him Borze could feel the soldiers’ grim, rapt attention as if it were a physical force crawling across his back, filling the air and making it into a stinking, unbreathable solid as they rejected and hated what they saw, and stood in paralysed terror, waiting. In his case the reaction was quite different. A cold, easy clarity came to him, a liquid readiness in all his body and his thoughts took on a smooth perfection. This was his gift.
‘What will they do now? How many people have they taken? Do they always sacrifice just one? Do you know if the others are unharmed, wherever they are?’
Barsan looked at him with a moment of surprise at the calm tone of his voice. ‘Now they’ll come and look for us. They often stay back and try to talk but so far whatever they’re trying to say is a load of garbage to our ears. All the people taken and whoever stays out will eventually be, uh, possessed by that smell whatever it is. Some kind of drug in the air, I don’t know the details. All the scientists who were good at that kind of thing are gone or dead.’ He paused to allow that to sink in but Borze just signalled him impatiently to continue.
‘They sometimes bring or get another. One time, there was this linguist, and after they ate her they talked pretty well but all they said was we had to go or we had to stay and be Karoo. Far as anyone knows being Karoo just means they eat you. Whatever it is that’s down in this pit is costing about thirty people a week. If it’s as big as they claim, full of a city’s worth of stuff… Well, you can figure it out how long that might take. It can’t be extracted in one piece. A lot gets packed and shipped…’ He stopped as Borze cut him off with a touch on his arm and they both looked at the slate.
The clearing with the pit was empty of human life. To the credit of the team on duty there were few signs of hasty abandonment, nothing dropped, only their scattered footprints in the mud betrayed the speed of their escape. And all led directly to the foxholes.
Two Karoo had come their way. They were big, one bipedal, the other on all fours, and they reminded Borze again of many animals in one although their predatory nature was clear in every sleek or ugly line. They were silent and the forest around them was also unnaturally quiet as they moved together, separating to investigate the hideouts. Tall, beaked, with long arms and powerful hindquarters, clad in green like grass and scales like the iridescent colours of black birds, the nearest to them came stalking directly to their door. To the appalled surprise of Borze he heard its claws scratch the door, and after that its knuckles knock.
‘Time to go,’ it said, and they could hear it both ways, its rasping voice in the air, through the door, and through the slate’s strange magic. The voice was that of the eaten man in cadence. Borze fancied it had a Lowlander’s accent. ‘No more use cann
on…’ But it paused and hissed fiercely then, raging, as they heard the distant, strange sound of a quasi-magical weapon Borze knew as something like a volt gun, but one much bigger than he had encountered before. Barsan touched the panel and the precious view of the monster at the door switched to the portal campsite. The other three Karoo he’d seen were there, in the midst of deserted space that was filled with an inexplicable fury of lightning. It radiated from a metal pole in the centre of the area they had invaded. Tendrils of white light wrapped the creatures around and inside the silvered nets they danced and jolted fiercely, smoking and burning. The discharges stopped, suddenly, and Barsan murmured, ‘That’s just the half charge. Usually puts them off for a while.’ As the strikes vanished. the creatures lay about, twitching and groaning and Borze realised it was indeed only a warning shot. This, he reasoned, was perhaps the storm cannon that he’d heard Alide was testing. In the clear air he saw that the metal pole was one of several positioned strategically about the site.
‘You don’t have that here.’
‘Doesn’t work here,’ Barsan said with resignation. ‘Something about the artefact prevents it.’
The door thudded with a concussion that Borze felt as he heard wood splinter and tear. Then there was coughing and sneezing from the monster and a frenzied assault that ended as suddenly as it had begun. ‘Give back. Return!’ the voice hissed, slavering wetly as it spoke. On the slate’s view the Karoo had regained their feet shakily. The largest, bearlike, with a fur that shifted of its own accord like a rug composed of beetles or one of those gigantic bee swarms that longer summers sometimes produced, reached out with a clawed hand and grasped the metal rod beside it, wrenching it free of its mounts in a single vicious jerk. It held the broken end up before one of its large brown eyes and stared at the twisted metal and the long strings of the wires that hung from the hollowed end. Then, as if they had been signalled, the three as one loped away fast, vanishing into the closest line of trees.
The destruction of their door stopped at the same moment. The slate, when it shifted view, showed an empty site.
‘That’s usually it,’ Barsan said with confidence. ‘We’ll wait a while before we sound the all clear though.’
Borze straightened up, camphor tears running in cool streaks down to the line of the bandana and soaking into it. He was silent a minute.
‘Something the matter?’ Barsan was weary now, the survivor of one more by the numbers assault.
‘Yeah,’ Borze said, feeling a horrible sense of unease. ‘I don’t understand why you’re all not dead yet.’
He reunited with Gau Tam an hour later, and listened to his second’s account of the assault at the portal with half an ear as they ate rice and beans in the officers’ tent and the heavy afternoon rain hammered on the canvas and drenched the outside world. At his elbow the lists of the missing and the dead lay in a neat stack, curled with damp. When Gau Tam was done he had finished his small meal.
‘Has the command here captured any living Karoo?’
Gau Tam frowned at the lack of reaction his story had gained but seeing the expression on Borze’s face he shook his head. ‘Not so far as I know. They said that they always fight or die. There were some corpses that were shipped back to the city for dissection, but no living captives.’
‘I want to see inside that thing, then we’re going back,’ Borze said. ‘But first, I guess Alide isn’t here in person but he must have someone dealing with this storm cannon. Bring them here.’
The woman who arrived to his summons was small and he recognised immediately her preoccupied and hunted look as someone who was entirely absorbed in their work and also under pressure from superiors. She introduced herself as Reslyn Frannatin, part of the Defensive Engineers, a research unit run by Alide’s ministry that had produced many interesting things for the Empire over the years. Borze’s own combat had been taught him in a hand-to-hand age and the majority of it was still bows and swords, though Glimshard magi were renowned for pulling out terrible weapons in times of need; this, and the machineries they had access to were the line that their various harassers had never brought themselves to cross. Reslyn was a typical engineer, he found: once he’d steered her to her pet subject her focus on it was such that she lost her inhibitions and talked at length although she was always careful with her wording.
He gathered that Alide’s cannon was still under test, that there were other machineries in development but as far as he could pick from the scattered motes of interest in her explanations this site was only a testbed, the weaponry of note was not here, it was somewhere else. Because it was not verified fit for field use it remained Alide’s sole property and Borze could not requisition it nor expect to be presented with it until it passed testing. Borze thanked her for her fascinating contribution and when she had gone asked Barsan give him a copy of all the shipping manifests from the site since it had been discovered. He left Gau Tam studying that, much to Tam’s utter disgust, and then demanded access to the artefact.
He and Barsan walked past the site of Ghoriat’s last moments. Bright blood splatters still shone here and there but the rain had washed most of it away, leaving shining mirror prints in the mud in the shape of hooves, three-toed claw feet and enormous paws. They sloshed through these, obliterating them on the way past. A troop of soldiers moved around them in silence, their salutes automatic. The lists of the dead ran through Borze’s head. The missing. He didn’t understand it.
They came to the pit, descended. The hatch was reopened now, the power cables attached. A woman came out and nearly hit both of them; her head was down and she was rushing, out of breath. The fact they couldn’t fit through the hatch together forced her to stop and look up. Borze saw only a mass of gold curly hair above jungle fatigues, and large, wary eyes, preoccupied with the usual gaze he knew for a mage’s half trance. She looked at him and stood back, clutching the items she was holding to her chest: a personal slate, something wrapped in a cloth. She looked pale and shocked. He figured she was new.
‘General,’ she said, after a moment. ‘What a surprise.’
‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ he said as Barsan stood in respectful position, deferring as ever to the woman, particularly because of her mage status and the fact she was under his protection.
‘Carlyn Loitrasta,’ she said, ‘Professor.’
‘I wonder if you would be good enough to show me around the inside of this object, Professor,’ Borze said. ‘An expert eye would be invaluable.’
‘I…’ He saw her hesitate and think it over but finally she nodded. ‘Yes, all right.’
‘Barsan, you’re free to go,’ Borze said, with an affable smile. He didn’t miss Barsan’s look of wry acquiescence. They exchanged salutes and Barsan had to go back to his duties. Borze turned his professional social smile, least used but he needed the practice for the evening, and saw the professor mirror it with her own. It looked paper thin. ‘Did the attack frighten you, Professor?’
‘Yes,’ she said. She swallowed and her hands gripped and re-gripped her items. ‘But it’s been the third, so, you know, getting a bit more used to it.’
He noted the repressed hysteria in her voice. ‘And how long have you been here?’ He stepped through the hatch, expecting her to follow, which she did, his tone conversational, that of a man entirely comfortable and in control. And then, as he saw the interior, the magelights heading off down and then branching out rapidly in long streamers like holiday bunting, their gleams eventually lost by distance, he lost his voice and found himself almost about to fall with a sudden, unexpected vertigo.
Loitrasta was the one who prevented him stumbling to his knees. ‘Just two days. Mind the slope,’ she said and waited in the dimness for him to adjust his sight. ‘I can’t show it all to you, only my section really. This way.’
For an hour, that was the last time that Borze felt anything like familiarity. When they re-emerged into the light and the dripping dusk he was a changed man. He understood n
ow why the Empress held on to this at the price she had been willing to pay and the silence, and the rest. But he still didn’t understand the most basic part of it. Why they were still alive.
He had seen one Karoo at close quarters, listened to him talk, seen him train soldiers, watched his speed, his ability, his reactions to the humans that surrounded him and he would have given nearly anything for a regiment of those – with that he wouldn’t need an army, less still any mercenaries. Everything Tzaban had claimed was true, it seemed. He knew therefore that this harassment was not a fully-fledged Karoo response. It served only to bring an endless smorgasbord of humans southward.
‘Will you be returning to Glimshard, General?’
He turned back and found Professor Loitrasta smiling at the expression on his face, which he was reasonably sure resembled that of a stunned rabbit. He recovered, stood tall, smelled the filthy stink of the mud and rot, but no stranger odours. ‘Yes, Professor. I am going directly now that I’ve done all I came to do.’
She nodded. ‘I want you to take this back with you please, to Professor Huntingore. Tralane Huntingore of Sircene. I understand she’ll be at the ball of course, tonight.’ She held out her personal slate. ‘Would you? I realise it’s cheeky. But you are going there, aren’t you?’
He considered her motive in passing it to him rather than use the military post and nodded, took it and slid it to the inside pocket of his damp, camphor-stained uniform.
She looked at him very seriously for a moment and nodded just a fraction, quite a different expression. By intelligence from Mazhd he knew she was Huntingore’s closest confidante. He felt a seismic shift within his convictions, another. ‘Do you have any particular news I might give the Empress?’
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